By Alissa Quart

Tell me something about yourself," says a Madison Avenue slicker clad in a shiny gray suit. "Is that your natural hair color?" A teenager with a wrestler's build answers brightly that he dyes it. "Do you work out?" the adman asks. "Of course," the youth says. The advertising executive then dismisses the boy. He auditions a young actress, asking her how much she weighs. "A hundred and twenty pounds," she replies. "Way too fat," her interrogator hoots back. This routine could well be a real-life visit to a commercial casting agent. It's not, though. It's a scene from a play performed, conceived, and written by high school students. As such, it's one tactic among many that are being used by a small but passionate number of "unbranded" teens to make sense of, and to fend off, a consumerism that threatens to engulf them.

I am watching this play a full two hours north of Kittery, Maine, in Readfield. That this is happening here - a bucolic place where signs trumpet the state slogan, "Maine: The Way Life Should Be" - is testament to how kids all over the country have found ways to counter what they see as the corporatization of adolescence.

Indeed, while many in Generation Y are conditioned to embrace logo culture, there are kids talking back to sponsored power in their schools, kids who do so knowing full well that acting up in this way can be a risky proposition.

In May 2001, then 15-year-old Tristan Kading was threatened with suspension from his public high school in Stonington, Connecticut, when he challenged a McDonald's representative holding mock job interviews with students in the school cafeteria. Kading accused the visitor of fronting for a company that lied about how its french fries were cooked. McDonald's had said its fries were prepared in vegetable oil; what it hadn't spelled out was that beef extract was added in the process, an acknowledgment that angered vegetarians. Exercising his skills at rhetoric and analysis didn't get Kading a high grade, though. Rather, he was booted out of his school's cafeteria, where a golden arches flag was covering a table, and he landed in the principal's office. Kading, a handsome kid with a personal affect that could be described as either sullen or shy, recalls that his principal told him to write an apology to the McDonald's representative and read it over the PA system or face suspension. Scared, he broadcast his apology, but he took his revenge afterward.

Having come of age in the 1990s, Kading knew that the media can be used to turn the power of the logo against itself. He wrote a letter about the incident to a local newspaper. After a series of meetings, the school district "reconsidered" the continuation of the job fair and interview event.

It's no wonder that all of this activity is happening now, the era of public school corporate sponsorship. Sponsorship of schools has become slickly omnipresent. It happens on a grand scale, as in corporations paying up to $100,000 for their names to grace a school gym or stadium (in exchange for that sum, Illinois's Vernon Hills High School dubbed its just-opened sports facility Rust-Oleum Field, after the paint maker).

Selling to kids in school happens more frequently on a smaller but no less insidious scale. A national organization called the Field Trip Factory began sending Boston-area kids on free trips in 2001. The organization says the complimentary visits in the "Be a Smart Shopper" program are about "fun and fitness." But there is serious promotion at work here. On the field trips, kids visit chain stores like the Sports Authority or receive a take-home assignment to "check your local newspaper for Roche Bros. or Sudbury Farms coupons" and then make a "special shopping list." But this is just the tip of the trademark iceberg.

Now 10 percent of all US public schools sign exclusive "pouring contracts" with soda companies, most of which include both vending machines and cafeterias. The dollars these manufacturers spend for these arrangements can be astronomical. Coca-Cola forged a 10-year, $11 million deal with the Colorado Springs, Colorado, school district in 1997, for instance, while Dallas's Grapevine High School made a 10-year, $4 million deal with Dr. Pepper. (For a while, Dr. Pepper logos adorned the roofs of Grapevine school buildings.) Of course, there's precedent for some of these school-corporate relationships. In 1979, Sheila Harty wrote about commercial practices in Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools, quoting a 1976-1977 annual membership survey of the National Education Association in which nearly half of US teachers reported they had used sponsored materials. In the two decades since then, that in-school "propaganda" has intensified both in style and frequency, spurred on by the pliancy of ever more impoverished schools and also by the sheer numbers - and materialism - of Generation Y. The leaders among the coterie of kids who are brand-resisting can be aggressive in their detection and rejection of the purchasing culture. They might even seem a bit paranoid - if the multinationals slithering into their classrooms weren't so omnipresent, that is.

In the late 1990s, Sarah Church incited some of her classmates to testify at local school board meetings against the branding of their school, Berkeley High, in Berkeley, California. But other students mocked her as "the girl who hates Pepsi" and were generally "intensely cynical" and brand-obsessed, Church recalls. Undaunted by the derision, she started the now defunct Center for Commercial-Free Public Education's Youth Advisory Board.

More recently, Nick Salter, 16, did a survey (one of the weapons in the arsenal of the anti-school-sponsorship movement) of his high school, Cherry Creek, located in a suburb outside of Denver. Noting the corporate products being pitched to him and others in his school's hallways, Salter estimates that there are 34 soda machines alone, all displaying ads. Ad-plastered billboards circle his school's baseball and football fields. There are textbooks that use M&M's in their examples. His cafeteria has both Domino's Pizza and Blimpie's sandwich outlets. Salter points to paper covers available for protecting his books that are a far cry from the brown paper bags that I used when I was a teenager. These are the now ubiquitous advertising-filled covers that many schools offer to their students, the brainchild of Primedia's Cover Concepts, which claims they are filling students' needs.

Cover Concepts dubs itself "America's largest in-school communications partner" and claims to reach 30 million kids in grades kindergarten through 12 in 43,000 schools nationwide by "working in tandem with school administrators to distribute free, advertiser-sponsored materials such as textbook covers, lesson plans, posters, bookmarks, specialty paks, lunch menus, and other fun educational materials."

In January 2001, for instance, Cover Concepts distributed 500,000 book covers for middle schools nationwide with samples of Cadbury Schweppes' Sour Patch Kids. Salter expresses outrage at Cover Concepts' stealthy tactics; he feels as if he is being duped by an adult world. His awareness of corporate sponsorship began in middle school. "We were made to watch commercials on Channel One in sixth grade," he says, referring to the Primedia-owned network that airs in thousands of public school classrooms every day.

Channel One has a daily 12-minute news program, with two minutes of commercials. Critics believe its ad-laden programming is an abuse of compulsory school attendance laws, because, in essence, students are being coerced to view ads during school hours. "Something was wrong with that picture," Salter says of Channel One. Kading, the McDonald's rebel, thinks along the same lines. "I am there to learn school things, not corporate dogma," he says. "I am the kid who wouldn't wear name-brand labels made by slave labor." Like Salter, Kading believes that corporate practices are part of a larger world of adult hypocrisy adults, we may simply think of these marketing tactics as slightly troubling. But kids may feel truly outraged. Many of them have realized only recently how deeply the commercial world penetrates their lives, and they feel they have been duped for years.

Politics aside, there is also the bare truism that some teenagers, as did youths in other eras, just want to distinguish themselves from their peers. As Sarah Thornton writes in the 1996 book Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, young people "construct elaborate scenarios whereby the superficial or belated activities of other young people act as a yardstick of the depth and style of their own culture." But the self-presentation of today's teenage brand resisters indicates something else to me. Being anti-corporate and "unbranded" provides a much-needed "other" identity for youths who have been cast as demographics rather than as citizens. Anti-corporate crusader is one of a few possible maverick personae available.

Jon Vine, 17, the playwright behind the Maine anti-corporate theater production, tends to look for a secret pattern of commodification in life. He likes bearing witness to the ways in which teenagers are being covertly sullied. "I feel manipulated when the teen films are so emotionally bombastic," he exhorts. I sit with him and the cast in the high school auditorium on an afternoon before a performance.

Vine and kids like him understand that they have grown up in the twilight of mass-produced cool and are still looking for the flip side of a world of appearances. Vine understood and was even in awe of the logic of branding and its celebrity glow. Like other unbranded kids, though, he refused to supplicate before powerful brands. Instead, he transformed his worshiping impulse into vitriolic, gleeful rejection.

As Naomi Klein writes in the 2000 book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, anti-corporate activism borrows the hipness and celebrity from the brands it seeks to critique and ultimately disempower. "Logos that have been burned into our brains by the finest image campaigns money can buy and lifted a little closer to the sun by their sponsorship of much-loved cultural events," Klein writes, "are perpetually bathed in a glow." She calls this effect the "loglo."

Kids aren't the only ones using the excitement that brands generate to galvanize a movement against brands in the classroom. The school board in Los Angeles, the second biggest school district in the country, voted last summer to ban soda vending machines in its schools starting in January 2004. The LA board cited the correlation between swelling soda pop consumption among teenagers and the growing percentages of obese youths. Its stand may well have caught the press's eye because the board was rebuffing Coca-Cola, with which it had a contract, not sugary drinks per se.

And in late 2001, the Seattle school board voted to put an anti-commercial policy in place in all of its schools. One of its major achievements was to order the facades of soda machines toned down. In one case, the large lighted Coca-Cola logos were changed to pictures of athletes, with only a small Coke logo in the corner of the display. Schools were ordered to remove sponsored wall ads, scoreboards, and reader boards and to stop showing the ad-filled Channel One. Seattle's Citizens' Campaign for Commercial Free Schools is also lobbying to prevent the 100-school district from renewing the Coke contract altogether by July.

Yet again, Coca-Cola and oh-so-recognizable names like it make for clear-cut and glamorous enemies, true villains. At least that's how the National Soft Drink Association is typifying the arguments of the anti-corporate forces, scoffing at the school board bans and the teenage protests as a case of mistaken identity.

The real villain, argues Sean McBride, director of communications for the association, is "the sedentary lifestyle" of many kids today - not the Mountain Dew teenagers may be drinking before chemistry class. "Sixty percent of schools have vending soda machines anyway, so the schools might as well make some commission money and earn some proceeds from exclusive contracts," says McBride. "Schools put out proposals for contracts because they decide they can make a little better deal for the students if they do it on an exclusive basis."

Alex Molnar, director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University, which puts out a yearly report on school sponsorship, couldn't disagree more. Molnar views the soda-pouring contracts as a bum deal for students. "The per-pupil per-year revenues of the contracts are very small," says Molnar. "The bulk of them have consumption incentives built in, so that the more the kids drink, the more the schools benefit. Schools figure out the best placement for machines and change school policy so kids can now drink soft drinks during class." What makes the idea of such strategic placement within schools particularly distressing is not just that these are impressionable kids, not just that schools are funded by tax dollars and ostensibly public, but because, especially in middle schools, youths are a captive audience. And the intensification of school sponsorship, both in quantity and also in canniness, is one reason why the "unbranding" kids have become increasingly important.

Vine says that he decided to write a play about the power of marketing and the effects of television's beauty ideals on girls "because we are manipulated by the images of cool, where we kids were taught to despise who we were." His analysis reflects the age-old ability, desire, and fantasy of adolescents to see through the hypocrisy of the adult world. And it is that very quality that now allows them to see through the shiny product-rich covers of Cover Concepts and over the Dr. Pepper school roofs to what is really of value - their imaginations, their ambitions, their affections.

This article was adapted from Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, © copyright 2003 by Alissa Quart. Used by arrangement with Perseus Publishing, a member of the Perseus Books Group. This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on 1/12/2003.