Baby, I Was Born This Way.

(And By "This Way," I Mean Mad about Advertising.)

A photo of me at ten, snapped in a modeling class I took at a community center.

When I was a kid, I wrote all the time, mostly poems.

By the time I was ten, I’d written so many, my mom suggested I publish a book. I loved the idea. It seemed like a serious project for a serious girl. I got right to work.

I used my father’s manual typewriter to transcribe twenty-five poems from my notebook, hitting every key with the gravity I was sure my writing deserved. Then, I bound the pages with masking tape and a piece of cardboard I covered with blue taffeta. After I signed it (“An autographed book is worth more,” my mother told me), I carried it to school in my Minnie Mouse backpack like the Hope Diamond. Together, my mom and I asked the librarian if she’d consider putting it in the collection.

“Luissa’s first book,” she exclaimed. “Of course!”

I’ll never forget how that made me feel; as if there wasn’t a question I’d grow up and write a million more books. I watched her craft a tag with a Dewey Decimal number and the first three letters of my last name — CHE. Then, she taped it to the spine. My mother and the librarian cheered for me as I slid it onto the shelf.

It was official; I was a writer.

Sadly, I never made a copy of the book. I’d like to think it’s still somewhere in the library at Indialantic Elementary School, but when I wrote the principal last year to ask about it, she didn’t write back. It’s safe to assume it’s probably long gone. Luckily, I still have a boxful of other kid poems I wrote that survived about forty moves and a decade in a Jersey City storage shed. I’m especially grateful I have this one I found recently, which is about (what else?) advertising:

Hidden Pursuasions (LOL, spelling)

If life were like a jean’s commercial, and everything was black or white with an a cappella soundtrack — we — you and I — with messed up hair, we’d sing and fight and kiss and make up in a thirty second fling.

In a movie and a short time, we could make it all so clear as we jog across the empty city streets in slow motion and feel our hair blow in the cool white breezes, and I could feel the chill through the man-made hole in the knee of my stonewash, and it would freeze my aspirations.

For I’d know, at any moment, we would fade to black with a very straightforward song, hanging on our screen, explaining it all.

Only after this rendezvous, I’m not quite sure what my advertisement is for, and I’m not quite sure if it’s marketable, or sellable, or if anyone out there is looking for what I’ve got and am ready to give.

If life were like a jean’s commercial, it could all be so concise and so clean and so clear. but now my life is a blaze of color, confusing and contradictory. Clashing plaids and stripes and polka dots decorate my times and my rush of unconventional ideas.

It doesn’t seem to discourage me though, because I can only imagine how simple and useless my times and existence could be, if I looked through my eyes and saw the shadows of grays and creams, in a thirteen-inch, 30 second world.

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I remember writing this poem after feeling like I’d lose my mind if I saw one more Levi’s 501 commercial in the ad breaks on MTV (a TV network I’d one day grow up and work for). I wanted everything the ads told me I should have, but most certainly, didn’t.

• I wanted to be effortlessly cool and pretty — and, of course, thin. I wanted to be the kind of girl who wore oversized clothes because it was a choice, a fashion statement not a necessity.

• I wanted my crushes to like me back and for boys to ask me to dance at the school dance.

• I wanted to be living in artsy, electric New York City, not in the swamps of Florida, where the air smelled like rotten eggs and I always got picked last in P.E.

• I wanted to be carefree and fun and silly and light-hearted — ways of being that felt impossible after my mother was diagnosed with cancer the year I turned 11.

Every time I saw one of these Levi’s ads, I’d think: If only my life were like a jean’s commercial. Then, I could just slip into the TV and I’d be happy and safe forever. My mom would be healthy, boys would like me and the rest of my life would fall into place. I see now (after spending decades in the ad business), I was living squarely in the bullseye of Levi’s target audience — chubby kids with spare allowance and a debilitating fear they’re too weird to be loved. These ads were pointed at me because I wasn’t like the people featured in them.

This difference is an essential part of why any “good ad” is “good.” If a person has what the ad is promising, they wouldn’t need to buy anything. Ads only work when they successfully convince people the thing they’re missing is the thing they need to spend their money on. Buy the jeans. Have the life. Advertising math only works in a deficit.

I have to imagine I wrote this poem as a way to try to reclaim my worth. Every time I saw a Levi’s ad (or any other ad/movie/TV show/music video/billboard/magazine), it was made clear to me that my body was not, in fact, a good one. The Levi’s ads forced me to recognize my difference. The products were the solution, but it was my body that was the problem. They didn’t even make the 501’s in my size. Like so many products designed to keep me in a state of despair, the jeans were just another test I hadn’t studied hard enough to pass.

My poem was my private attempt to call bullshit on the whole thing. In many ways, this was also the driver that kept me working in advertising far too long. For years, I tried to change the way it worked from the inside, but it took being squarely in the machine to see that nothing about advertising is interested in changing. Now, I’m back to where I began — on the outside filing my complaints.

Even with my proud kid contrarian stance, I can’t deny that the difference between the me I really was and the me the ads wanted me to be was painful. Also, it wasn’t just the ads reminding me how badly I was failing at being a girl. Timmy B. — my big crush — told me he couldn’t ever like me because my legs were “as big as tree trunks,” and around that same time, my orchestra teacher grabbed the fat under my arm and told me if I wanted to be a successful violin player, I’d have to “get rid of all that.” After that, I stopped playing and never touched a violin again. I guess I wasn’t the only one learning about what made a girl worthwhile from the TV.

The adult me knows far too well why ads work, and because of this, I can’t deny how great this campaign is — iconic even. The vibes are immaculate. The film, gritty and aspirational. The music, memorable. I aspire to dress like this even today? These ads — they’re timeless, or whatever. To my kid brain, they also made the idea of living in New York seem like the most chill and easy thing to do too. I’m pretty sure this campaign is about 27% of the reason I moved there in my early 20’s. (The rest of that pie chart is filled with other cornerstone NY media influences like: The Muppets Take Manhattan and Tootsie.)

I can’t take all the credit. My radical ideas about the flimsy facade of advertising weren’t all mine. I had a great teacher. My mother, Rose — the same woman who wanted me to know I was a real writer — was desperate to teach me about life. Most of the years we spent together were filled with her frantically trying to pass on every shred of knowledge she had about the messed-up world to try and protect me, since it was clear we wouldn’t have a lot of time together. When it came to ads — and life — Rose wanted me to know my value. She wanted me to know I didn’t need to buy a lot of things to be happy.

“These ads aren’t real, Luissa,” she’d tell me. “The only thing a person needs in life is love and that’s not something you can buy at the mall.”

The other day, I told a friend, “Advertising’s such a dumb thing for me to spend my life thinking about. It’s honestly so embarrassing. There are so many other, bigger things I ought to be worrying about, but I keep coming back to it.” Now, I’m here — on a Substack about advertising; a few more thousand or so words written again about this thing I can’t shake. I guess what I’m trying to say is that somehow, the thing that fills our childhood imaginations can stitch to our bones and become the recurring theme of our lives.

Advertising speaks to me because I’m fluent in advertising. I was raised on it. I’ve never been alive without its companionship or its judgment. Advertising has haunted me, ridiculed me and left me feeling worthless. Occasionally, it has given me hope and informed the direction of my dreams. I’ve studied it, criticized it, made a career out of it, believed in it, romanticized it, identified with it and deconstructed it for as long as I can remember. Advertising is nothing, a distraction, a nuisance — but it’s also everywhere, baked into everything. I hate it, but I can’t deny it, advertising is the map I’ve used since childhood to help me understand my place in the world.

Me, trapped inside a Levi’s 501 ad. I’m on the right.

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Oh, hi! Thanks for getting this far if you got this far.

I’m still feeling out what this place should be. For this one, this week, it felt right to dig a little deeper. Never fear, there are more jokes and snark and more practical advice and news-y stuff planned in the weeks to come. Tell me if you want me to tackle any aspect of this dumb subject and I’ll be glad to take it on. Also, if you feel moved, it’d be great if you’d share this Substack with anyone you think might resonate with it (maybe a person who used to be a girl or someone who makes ads that speak to them?).

I appreciate you being here as I explore what it is I’m trying to say about this “thing” — advertising — that’s left its mark on me. I appreciate you being here. Please also drop a comment if you want to share any ads you saw as a kid (or last week?) that left you feeling some kind of way. I assure you, this is what ads are supposed to do, so if there’s one you think has stuck to you, I’d be happy to try to help you perform an advertising exorcism.

Talk soon, I hope — and in the meantime, here’s to hoping all our lives look just like a jeans commercial today and every day,

xoLu

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