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.
Lu Chekowsky [she/they] is a writer and Emmy Award-winning creative director. In Lu's most recent job in the advertising industry, she was lead creative director for video at Facebook. Before that, Lu was the SVP of brand creative at Comedy Central, where they developed campaigns for shows like The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, South Park, Nathan for You, and Broad City. Previously, Lu was VP, creative director at MTV, where they made ads for Teen Wolf, Jersey Shore, The Real World, and the Video Music Awards. Before working in entertainment, Lu was a creative director and copywriter at Wieden+Kennedy, where she over- saw work for brands such as Jordan, Noxzema, Delta Airlines, and The National MS Society. Lu is a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts / New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in nonfiction literature, and their writing has been supported by MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Craigardan, and Tin House. Her essays and poetry have been published in The Rumpus, Pigeon Pages, and Autofocus, and her pieces about the cultural impacts of advertising have appeared in Ad Age and Muse by Clios. Lu lives in the Hudson Valley.
