Don't Buy What I'm Selling
On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Part memoir, part manifesto, this is the "fascinating, smart, and hilarious look" (Christie Tate) of a woman determined to go deep inside advertising so she could save the world—and herself. What could possibly go wrong?
As a high-level advertising creative director for 14 years, Lu Chekowsky willed inanimate objects to life and made people want to buy stuff they didn’t need. Her colleagues called her “Mary Manifesto” because she could whip up an emotional ad campaign like no one else. Need someone to channel Michael Jordan so people will line up and buy his latest sneaker? That’s Lu. Need to convince a cranky teen heartthrob to take his shirt off for an ad designed to get teenage girls across America to swoon? That’s her too. It was a regular workday when she made same-day cross-country trips between New York and LA to satisfy the CEOs who counted on her to pump up their profits—ignoring her own voice and using it in service of their company’s bottom line. Chekowsky was great at her job because she’d trained for it her whole life. She'd gotten the memo about how worthless her body was at moving products—because she was the one who wrote it.
As someone whose body was always far from what the world held up as ideal, Chekowsky grew up trying to find a place where she could fit in. Everywhere she looked, the images she saw were designed to make girls feel terrible. The only person who could make her feel worthy was her larger-than-life mom; but even that was complicated when her mother got sick with cancer when she was just eleven years old. For years, Chekowsky tried to look past what it felt like to be underestimated by her male colleagues, the 14-hour work days spent satisfying the demands of the latest celebrity/boss/pop star/social media app, and her work that required her to, every day, perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards, before she went home and binged alone on bags of takeout.
Don't Buy What I'm Selling is a dishy peek behind the curtain of a billion-dollar industry, but it's also the journey of one former ad executive who lived a life of contradictions—until she couldn't anymore. With honesty and heart, interspersed with behind-the-scenes looks at the real-world tactics brands use to prey on consumers, it is perfect for readers of Roxane Gay, Aubrey Gordon, and Lori Gottlieb—and anyone who’s bought a product from an Instagram ad and instantly regretted it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Advertising veteran Chekowsky's uneven debut combines a poignant memoir with an overfamiliar insider's account of the ad industry. She recalls growing up in 1980s Florida as the child of sedentary parents who "didn't like to move and were proud of it," detailing how her weight made her the target of bullying from an early age. Rising the ranks of the ad world as an adult, Chekowsky encountered yet more messaging that appearances mattered more than substance. She memorably describes, for example, using makeup to highlight the abs of a Teen Wolf actor while shooting a commercial for the MTV series. As Chekowsky recounts how grueling hours and an obsession with profits wore her down in jobs at Facebook and Comedy Central, she links her success in advertising to her learned hatred of her body. Those sections are more effective than the author's whistleblowing—in one toothless satirical interlude, she compiles an ad pitch that frames "The Future" as "a Sam's Club built on top of a Walmart Superstore, jammed inside The Mall of America, and drop-shipped to the world's largest Amazon warehouse." Though Chekowsky's passion is palpable, her execution can be wobbly. It's a mixed bag.
