For the past ten-plus years, I’ve worked in advertising. I’ve held creative and content roles at agencies and in-house. I’ve worked with Meta, Nike, Tinder, Levi’s, Sonos, Merrell, and Hanna Andersson. I’ve won three Telly Awards and an American Advertising Award.

I ran a social campaign for Tinder during the pandemic featuring Megan thee Stallion that drove 800 million impressions. I launched Meta’s ‘We the Culture’ initiative on Instagram. I worked with Levi’s and filmed a very drunk DJ on the highline for their Spring campaign. I led content and strategy for Hanna Andersson, Dose, and GoodPop.

I’m currently working on writing a satirical novel that has nothing to do with selling anything to anyone. It’s set in New York’s ad world and follows a burned-out creative director and his cynical team as they launch a viral campaign that accidentally creates QAnon.

Welcome. Or welcome back. Either way, thanks for reading :)

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

And look, they’re not entirely wrong. But the conversation doesn’t need to be so breathlessly dumb or dire.

Grace Kao, the CMO at Snap (she’s in the middle), said something during a panel that actually landed with me. She was talking about CGI and how it’s evolved dramatically over the past couple of decades, with the tools getting better, cheaper, and faster. And then she said: But without a good story, your movie is still bad.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire argument. You can stop reading here if you want.

But she kept going, and it was worth hearing. AI can help you scale. It can help you brainstorm. It can help you mock up and generate. But at the center of everything, there has to be a strong concept. A strong story. People appreciate craft. They also appreciate a really cool concept. And those two things are not the same as output.

Think about Moonlight. A film made for $1.5 million, with virtually no visual effects and no spectacle. Just light and silence and the weight of a person trying to exist inside a life that keeps pressing in on them. Every frame is handmade. The story does all the work, and the craft is in the restraint. The craft is in what gets left out, what gets held back, what never gets said out loud. It won Best Picture over a $20 million musical.

Now think about Mad Max: Fury Road. Wall-to-wall mayhem. Practical effects and CGI woven tightly together. That movie is a technical miracle. And it works because underneath all of it, there’s a simple story about freedom and who gets to have it. Strip away every explosion, and you’ve still got something that’s compelling.

Both of those films land. One barely touches the CGI tools. One uses every tool imaginable. The variable isn’t the technology. The variable is whether anyone involved had something to say.

Here’s what I keep thinking about, though, and it has less to do with advertising and more to do with being a person on the internet in 2026:

People, on a primal level, want to connect with other people. They want to see other people. They want to emotionally understand other people. Why they think the way they do, why they feel what they feel. That’s not a marketing insight. That’s just being alive.

I know that when I read a piece of text now, I’m scanning for it. I’m looking for the tell. Too many em dashes. That weird frictionless way of writing. The way it says a lot without actually committing to anything. I want to find the phony in the room. I want to find the AI-generated text, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think we’ve all become amateur forensic linguists, hunting for anything that feels off.

Part of what makes LLM-generated content feel weird is that it’s an aggregate. It’s trained on everything, so it sounds like a little bit of nothing. The sum of many parts, smoothed into something that’s just slightly more bland than a real person. It’s beautiful, but there are no flaws. It hasn’t lived a real life, but it’s pretending like it did. It hasn’t lost anything. It hasn’t been embarrassed. It hasn’t sat in a parking lot at 2 am, making a decision it’ll regret. And you can feel that absence.

We see it. And I love that people want to hunt it down. They want something real. They want to read something that’s dripping with actual human stakes, with the mess and the nerve and the specific, irreplaceable weirdness of a person.

AI is coming for your throat. That part’s true. The tools are real, they’re fast, and they’re going to keep getting better. But the thing the tools can’t manufacture is the reason anyone should care. The story. The specificity. The flaws that make it land.

That part’s still yours. And I think, always will be.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

If you opened the app around the deal closing, you likely got that familiar, bleak pop-up: “We updated our Terms/Privacy Policy.”

So… who “owns” TikTok in the U.S. now?

Many people and many companies. Under the new structure, ByteDance is down to 19.9%, and the other 80.1% is held by a US-based investor group with Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX as “managing investors,” each with 15% stakes.

TikTok has framed this as a data-security update with US user data housed on Oracle’s US cloud, audits, protocols, and board oversight.

–-

Alongside the ownership shift, TikTok pushed an updated privacy policy that, most notably, adds precise location (at a GPS coordinates-level) if you allow the app to use your phone’s location services.

Important nuance: TikTok is saying it can collect your coordinates when you give permission, and it can also infer less precise location through other means (like IP). TikTok’s own help page makes this explicit. You can turn off Location Services, but TikTok may still retain less specific location info previously inferred (like what city you live in).

So yes: the new language is a step toward more granular tracking, especially if you (or your phone) ever taps “Allow.”

–-

A lot of the collective panic this week has been fueled by one detail: the updated policy spells out categories of “sensitive information” TikTok could collect, including things like sexual orientation, transgender/nonbinary status, and citizenship/immigration status.

Some legal folks are saying the disclosure is, at least in part, compliance language (i.e., “we have to tell you what categories exist.”) But here’s the thing: even if it’s “just disclosure” it’s still disclosure of their capabilities.

–-

But, who’s at risk when apps know exactly where you are?

Everyone. Precise location data can show where you live, where you work, who you spend time with, which clinics you visit, which protests you attend, which bar you went to last night, and whether you sleep at the same address every night. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been screaming (correctly) for years that location data can be sold and repurposed in ways users never intended.

• To our immigrant community: Location data and data broker information has been used in ways that can support surveillance and enforcement, sometimes without warrants, sometimes through data purchases by agencies like ICE.

• To our trans community: This data can expose routines and sensitive healthcare patterns, especially in an era where gender affirming care is politicized and scrutinized.

• To our LGBTQ+ community: Geolocation can be weaponized; there are documented cases where location features have been used to entrap or target LGBTQ+ people.

• To anyone who simply wants companies out of their personal business: You deserve privacy.

–-

So what can you actually do?

If you don’t want TikTok (or any downstream partner, or any government agency with access through legal process or the data economy) to know your location, the best move is to delete the app and its data.

Because “precise location” is only one pipeline. Apps can still infer a lot from IP, Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth signals, device identifiers, and cross-app tracking ecosystems.

That said, if you’re staying on TikTok (no judgment, we all have our vices), here are the most meaningful settings to lock down your information:

If you’re on iPhone:

1. Settings >> Privacy & Security >> Location Services >> TikTok

2. Set Allow Location Access to Never (or While Using the App)

3. Toggle Precise Location OFF

If you’re on Android:

Pick whichever menu your phone has (both are standard Android paths):

1. Settings >> Location >> App location permissions >> TikTok >> Don’t allow

Two quick things:

• Even with location permission off, TikTok can still infer approximate location (like city) from things like IP/network signals. TikTok notes this in their own explanation.

If you want zero location exposure from TikTok: delete the app and its data.

Want to know more about these updates:

• More about the Electronic Frontier Foundation

• More about the new owners

• More about TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC

• More about the new user guidelines

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

Streetlights, neon, palm trees swaying in the wind, but there were no people to admire any of it. Just the occasional car sliding through an intersection way too fast. The air was cooler than it should’ve been. Everything sounded farther away.

I’d been working on a Tinder campaign called Put Yourself Out There, which is a phrase that reads like a motivational poster until you attach it to something real. The idea was simple in the way the best ideas are, and slightly unhinged in the way advertising requires:

People screenshotted their Tinder bios.
We put them on billboards.
New York, LA, Vancouver.

Actual billboards. The kind that don’t just exist as mock-ups in a deck. The kind you can’t close with Command-W.

And Tinder bios are their own little genre of American literature. A bio is someone trying to be funny without sounding like they’re trying to be funny. Someone trying to be honest without sounding like they’re asking for help.

We took those lines, those tiny attempts at being seen, and blew them up to billboard scale.

The campaign went live while LA was locked down. Which meant “out there” was mostly theoretical. The city was still LA, technically, but it felt like it was running in low power mode. Work continued through screens and emails and group chats, but none of it felt like it landed anywhere. It was all inside the computer. Clean, reversible, easy to pretend it didn’t matter.

One night, late, I put on shoes and walked up my street to Sunset Boulevard. At the top of the hill, Sunset opens up. Even empty, it still looks like itself: wide, glossy, slightly smug. A boulevard designed to be looked at.

And there was the digital billboard, cycling through ads over an almost silent street.

I stood on the corner and waited, watching the rotation. Like I was waiting for a sign, which, technically, I was.

Then our campaign showed up.

A Tinder bio, blown up to the size of a small building. A sentence someone typed in bed, probably in sweatpants, now floating over Sunset Boulevard.

And it hit me in a way I didn’t expect. Not pride exactly. Not joy, joy felt like an emotion we were all rationing at the time. It was more like a quiet, physical relief.

Proof that something I made had left my laptop and entered the world.

Advertising is strange like that. You spend weeks building something meant to exist in public, and then it goes live and disappears into the scenery. You rarely get to experience it the way a stranger does. It becomes wallpaper. It dissolves.

But that night I experienced it. Fully. Alone.

Which felt both wrong and weirdly perfect, because lockdown made everything communal private. Big moments got smaller. Career highs happened in kitchens. Celebrations happened in group texts. The world kept moving, but it moved behind closed doors.

So I stood there on Sunset Boulevard at midnight, watching a stranger’s bio loop through a billboard schedule, thinking about what “put yourself out there” means when the world has told everyone to stay inside.

That’s why it’s still a career defining moment for me. Not because it was glamorous. Not because it was shared. But because it was tangible. Because in the middle of a year that felt flattened and muted, something I made existed at full volume, lit up over a quiet street, whether anyone was there to see it or not.

I walked home a few minutes later. I didn’t post it. I didn’t make it content. I don’t even remember if I took a photo.

I just kept the moment to myself, like a receipt.

Like: Okay. This is real. The world is still out there. And apparently, so is my work.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

Photo Credit: Steven Pahel

Art Credit: Aarón Blanco Tejedor

Once upon a time ‘Word of the Year’ felt anthropological. A little nerdy even. A bunch of people studying culture and language in cardigans and sensible shoes, looking at data and saying: “Huh. People sure are saying selfie a lot. Let’s write that down.”

Now it feels like any other PR-able moment. A means to drive discourse. A way to get people to argue on the internet for a full news cycle.

Pick a word that already annoys people. Build a press release around it. Wait for the outpouring of outrage.

‘Rage-bait’ really is the perfect choice because it’s doing the exact thing it describes. I mean, I felt the need to write about it. I guess I was filled with rage.

You read “Oxford selected ‘rage bait’ as their world of the year” and you feel baited. The irony is almost too clean. The institution that is supposedly reporting on language is now just…participating in the same engagement economy as everyone else.

Anger is cheap, fast, and generally shareable. It’s easier to get people to say “I hate this,” then get someone in the comments saying “Wow, this is such a quiet, thoughtful observation about how language reflects culture.”

Brands figured this out a long time ago. Now, even the institutions that catalogue words are in on the game. I guess that’s bound to happen in an economy where attention is currency.

Personally, I would have gone with Oxford’s backup “aura farming” as my word of the year, but that’s because my charisma can’t be matched.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

Guam is a US territory. Which means, yes, it’s part of the United States, but also, no, you don’t really have to think about it unless you’re in the military or way too into American history.

Here’s the relevant part: I’m an American citizen. I was born on Guam, and under US law, people born there are US citizens.

And yet, no one has ever asked me (not even once) if I’m “really” American. It’s not because everyone’s well-versed in US territories. It’s because I’m a white woman.

^ That’s me (on the right) circa 1992.

If you’re wondering how the United States ended up with Guam: it’s not because America woke up one day and thought, let’s expand our cultural tapestry.

Guam was ceded to the US by Spain in 1898, after the Spanish–American War. It mattered because it’s a strategic point in the Pacific. A place you can use, hold, stage from, defend, and project power from. That’s the cleanest way to say it.

World War 2 is the part most people vaguely remember, because Guam was invaded and occupied by Japan and later retaken by the US. But the reason the US had Guam in the first place was already baked in: strategy.

–

Puerto Rico also became a US territory in 1898. Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship by federal law in 1917.

So: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio is also an American citizen.

And yet, every time Bad Bunny reaches a new tier of cultural relevance, some dipshit on the internet asks if he’s “even American.”

It’s not that people don’t know Puerto Rico is connected to the US. It’s that, emotionally, they don’t want it to count. Or they want it to count only when it’s convenient: enlistment, labor, markets, culture. Pick your category.

–

American Samoa is also a US territory, but it sits in a different legal bucket: people born there are generally US nationals, not automatically US citizens, at birth.

Which is the kind of legal language that makes you realize how hard the US works to maintain a system where “belongs to us” and “belongs with us” are allowed to be two different things.

And yes: Tulsi Gabbard is an American citizen. She was born in American Samoa and is a US citizen. Right now, she’s also the US director of national intelligence.

–

The citizenship question is rarely asked like a sincere administrative inquiry. It’s asked like a little test. A little gate. A way to say: You can be famous here, but you still have to prove you’re allowed to belong.

I have never been asked to prove it. And I’m not special. I’m just the kind of American people accept as default. That’s it. That’s the whole magic trick.

So when someone does the whole “Bad Bunny isn’t American” routine, I hear something else underneath it: Not “I’m confused about US territories.” More like: “I have a narrow, private definition of what an American is.”

For the Record:

• I’m an American.

• Bad Bunny is an American.

• Tulsi Gabbard is an American.

• The fact that we keep having to say this out loud tells you exactly what kind of country we are.

If we're being honest, the real question isn’t “Is he American?” It’s: who gets to be American without the cross-examination.

I’m not saying anything people can’t already see. I’m just stating the difference: citizenship is a legal status, but “American” is something people decide in their heads.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.