Abstract
Although not a new issue, the debate on children's advertising and brands still continues to generate great interest among several scholars, politicians, and social institutions. By providing new empirical evidence and domains for further investigation, ongoing research challenges established paradigms and research methodologies. In this paper the authors explore the competent and critical ways by which children interpret and decode advertising. Grounding the argumentation on the empirical evidence of a dataset of 28 advertisements manipulated and re-created by children, the authors show how children are able to provide new symbolic meanings and implications for branding, thus opening the way for a more critical view of the phenomenon.