“Advergames” draw children into product loyalty.

Celebrities endorse energy-rich, nutrition-poor, sugary foods.

Critics call these efforts the “construction of fun” and denounce them as predatory.

Many decades before clever marketers printed QR codes on the backs of sugary breakfast cereal boxes that opened the cyber door to mesmerizing promotional product tie-in video games, radio dramas attracted kids with publicity puzzles.

Fans of the delightfully narrated film A Christmas Story will remember how young Ralphie, the main character, faithfully tuned in to his weekly cliff-hanger radio drama, Little Orphan Annie, to listen to encrypted clues. He used his “Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Pin” to unlock a message that only devoted followers could read.

His decryption had demanded preparation. Ralphie had needed to mail to the show’s sponsor little foil tabs that came inside boxes of the chocolaty drink-mix, the once-famous Ovaltine. Ovaltine, initially styled as medicinal by the Swiss chemist who devised the mixture, combined malted barley, powdered eggs, and cocoa into a not-so-tasty yeast-flavored formula meant to beef up skinny kids and to restore recuperating adults.

Ralphie drank his share, and when he had accumulated enough of the tabs and mailed them in, he effectively joined the “Radio Orphan Annie Secret Society.” Then the company would send their secret agent a brass decoder decryption device about the size of a half-dollar. With this premium in hand, keen listeners to Little Orphan Annie, like Ralphie, could decrypt a clandestine message. (Though the story comes from the writer Jean Shepherd’s fictionalized autobiography, the promotion and this little machine were a real thing between 1935 and 1940.)

Ralphie recorded the encoded message number by number, and then deciphered it, twisting the dial on the cipher machine to reveal it letter by letter. Once unraveled........

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