Orange is the New Purple
How does an aspiring literary fiction writer convert to advertising?
Honestly, I spent four years after earning a B.A. in writing fantasizing about a spot in SU’s exceptionally elite M.F.A. in Fiction program (George Saunders’s “Sea Oak” changed my life — just to have him as a teacher would be the pinnacle of writerly achievement. If you read it, you’ll probably feel the same). Or any M.F.A program for that matter. After my first round of applications and consequent mixed results (including, of course, a polite rejection from Syracuse), I realized most of the programs I’d been accepted to didn’t excite me the way I was hoping. Thus, I committed to slogging through another year at my dead-end job, shuffling papers and saving more money toward my escape plan.
While that year dragged on and the act of completing half a dozen more grad school apps drained my mental energy, the extra time (and pouring over innumerable university websites) gave me the opportunity to think more about what I really wanted from a school, other than simple liberation from my vacuous administrative assistant position. The more I focused on that, the more I realized I was in need of something that another degree in creative writing wouldn’t necessarily give me. It needed to be different — something that challenged my preconceptions of communication as I already understood it. So I considered advertising. Storytelling with a strategy. Thirty second spots of flash fiction. Emotion embodied in several words splashing across a glossy page. In a frenzied, 4 a.m. epiphany, I found my answer.
Probably due to the sheer amount of time spent ogling the words “all students are fully funded. Each student admitted receives a full tuition scholarship in addition to an annual stipend” on the M.F.A page, Syracuse had me under some kind of spell — powerful enough to be the first place I looked for an advertising program. I hardly knew a thing about the field, but Newhouse exemplified all sorts of fantasies I never knew I had: Only one year? Starts in July, not September? Small classes? Intensive curriculum, real client work, something called the “Newhouse Mafia” that I didn’t quite understand (but wanted to be part of, regardless). The list kept growing. I very literally started my application after my first visit to the website. And less than six months later, I packed up my car to start my new adventure.
The first book I read in this summer’s Boot Camp was Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. If you’re unfamiliar, Godin is best known as a pop marketing guru, whose famous work pitches the provocative idea that in order to be successful, you need to make your brand (your product, your service, your business—even yourself) remarkable. “Very good”? Forget it — very good isn’t good enough. Make yourself outstanding, memorable, enticing. Make yourself incomparably different and worthy of buzz. Though the book was new to me, the concept was familiar. The concept was Newhouse itself.
And I sit here every day, sipping out of an orange water bottle emblazoned with the Newhouse logo. I take pictures of our absurd, anthropomorphic orange mascot and show them — no, brag about them — to my friends back home. I throw orange emojis on everything, and ooze endless praise of my teachers and classmates and classes and how I did math for homework and didn’t even hate it. I’m hooked. I’m sold. I #bleedorange. I’m a brand loyalist.
But it’s because Newhouse practices what they preach. They are the sealed acceptance letter in the mail when everyone else emails you to say, “Your admission decision has been made: check the portal for your results.” This whole place is a genuine and exciting new chapter. I sit squarely in one of the four stomachs of a purple cow.
–Izzy Sliker is a graduate student studying advertising
