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Channel One is pushing the market-research model even further, frequently enlisting "partner" teachers to develop class lessons in which students are asked to create a new ad campaign for Snapple or to redesign Pepsi's vending machines. In New York and Los Angeles high-school students have created thirty-second animated spots for Starburst fruit candies, and students in Colorado Springs designed Burger King ads to hang in their school buses. Finished assignments are passed on to the companies -- all subsidized by the taxpayer-funded school system.

Perhaps the most infamous of these experiments occurred in 1998, when Coca-Cola ran a competition asking several schools to come up with a strategy for distributing Coke coupons to students. The school that devised the best promotional strategy would win $500. Greenbriar High School in Evans, Georgia, took the contest extremely seriously, calling an official Coke day in late March during which all students came to school in Coca-Cola T-shirts, posed for a photograph in a formation spelling Coke, attended lectures given by Coca-Cola executives and learned about all things black and bubbly in their classes. It was a little piece of branding heaven until it came to the principal's attention that in an act of hideous defiance, one Mike Cameron, a nineteen-year-old senior, had come to school wearing a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo. He was promptly suspended for the offense. "I know it sounds bad - 'Child suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt on Coke Day,'" said principal Gloria Hamilton. "It really would have been acceptable...if it had just been in-house, but we had the regional president here and people flew in from Atlanta to do us the honor of being resource speakers. These students knew we had guests."