Entrenched in signifying practices, advertising is more than a brand selling its products or services to an audience; it is an indication of wider social and cultural structures, relationships, and processes. For children, advertising has invariably deep consequences, in that its ubiquity can form the social contours of childhood and act as a site for broad cultural negotiations. Through a historical survey of children’s cultural sentimentalization and the simultaneous formation of their hypercommercialized media environment, this thesis is attentive to the role that Canadian public policy and legislation play in regulating child-directed commercial messaging, and how this governance fundamentally shapes, and is shaped by, discursive tropes of the child consumer. Emphasis is placed on investigating how boundaries of contemporary product placement regimes are set, as they operate across both broadcast television and streaming services in Canada. This research also contemplates a more general inquiry into policies pertaining to the food and beverage industry. As the Canadian media landscape is the focus of this research, Advertising Standards Canada (“ASC”) and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (“CRTC”) are examined to highlight the complicated and political nature of policy-making. Doing so acknowledges the ways in which institutions draw on social categories, resources, and meanings, which simultaneously mould the individual and their relationship with the state. Competing jurisdictions, namely the British and American industries, are used as points of comparison.