American Eagle CMO “Dumbfounded” By “Absurd” Claims Sydney Sweeney Campaign Was About Anything But Jeans
It could be awarded the campaign of the year if we were handing out awards for controversy and drama. And now, American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers has gone on record unpacking what he calls “the most fascinating eight weeks” in his career.
The ad in question, of course, is none other than Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle “Great Jeans” campaign. In the spot, Sweeney appeared in full denim, talking about her “great jeans” while the camera panned suggestively to her chest before she asked it to zoom back up to her face. What may have been intended as cheeky wordplay landed as something much darker. Critics called it “racist, sexist, and eugenics-coded.”
The campaign inflamed cultural conversations, and within a few days of its release, it was basically impossible to find a single person who hadn’t watched the ad.
Dr Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel, author of Cultural Intelligence for Marketers, called it “one of the most outrageously racist marketing outputs I’ve seen in quite a while.”
She drew direct connections between the “good genes” pun and eugenicist codes of racial supremacy: “When read semiotically, this marketing campaign parades the same symbols and codes long used to prop up eugenicist fantasies of racial supremacy and—by extension—MAGA”.
Inclusive marketing strategist Lola Bakare echoed that alarm: “Did we all forget about WWII? We all get the word play around jeans/genes…I’m surprised to see so many of my colleagues celebrating this without seeing the extremely harmful connotations.”
“If Sydney Sweeney has good genes in Magamerica 2025…tell me, pray tell, who has bad genes?” she added.
Appearing on the Uncensored CMO podcast, Brommers said he knew the campaign was going to get a response, but the response was “beyond our wildest dreams”.
“We were trying to partner with the it girl of 2025 to create the it genes campaign of 2025. When you cast someone like Sydney Sweeney, you know that it’s going to be in the spotlight. Sydney is a cross-generational talent. She appeals to both genders. She is someone who dresses up, but she also feels like the girl next door and is very relatable. She loves to work on cars, she loves to be in the outdoors, and there is no doubt that she is the it girl in the US in 2025 and probably after this campaign, now the it girl of the globe,” he explained.
While the initial response was overwhelmingly positive, Brommers admitted the cultural backlash came as a surprise. “I am still a little bit dumbfounded, because I think the claims are absurd, and I think a vast majority of Americans understand that the claims are absurd. It was always about the jeans… It was a curveball that we didn’t see coming and certainly created another interesting narrative in the launch of the campaign”.
Despite the uproar, Brommers said the brand’s data told a very different story. “It almost felt like I was living in alternate universes… on one side, we’re looking at very encouraging business performance… But in the other universe, you’re hearing all the noise on social media. The two universes didn’t honestly compute in my mind.”
So, rather than rushing to respond, Brommers said the brand took a breath.
“We actually just sat back for a second and gathered more data… before we made our first and only statement of the entire period,” he explained. “We didn’t see that there was anything to clarify… People were really into this campaign, and there was one and only one day of net negative social sentiment.”
Sales Success, Or Footfall Failure
That decision, he said, ultimately paid off. “It worked really well for us, and that honestly allowed other voices to be heard. I think more and more people seemed to be reacting that this is a little bit absurd… roughly eight, nine days after launch, we came out with our one and only statement, working with Sydney’s team, and it was beloved. People really liked our response.”
Brommers also credited Sweeney for standing by the brand. “We needed to be the best possible partners to Sydney Sweeney, because the reality is, this was always supposed to be a talent partnership, and to her credit, she stuck with us. And you better be damn certain that we were going to stick with her,” Brommers said.
“It soon became very apparent that not only does Sydney Sweeney have great jeans, Sydney Sweeney can sell great jeans, because the sales were unbelievably encouraging out of the gate”.
“We gained 1 million new customers in the course of those six weeks. That’s unheard of,” Brommers said. “We also saw the highest brand demand for American Eagle in 20 years… Things that Sydney wore were selling out either first day or the first week”.
By September, the campaign had amassed staggering reach. “We’re closing in on 45 billion impressions for the campaign,” he said. “YouTube has told me that this campaign has been seen on their platform alone eight times more than Beyoncé and Levi’s… This was much bigger than the advertising industry. This became a cultural phenomenon that everyone was talking about, and everyone had an opinion about.”
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“When we set out to partner with Sydney, we didn’t just want to participate in culture. We actually wanted to define culture. And I know that that sounds like a hollow statement coming from a CMO, but damn it, we did it, right?”
“We actually did define culture. In the late part of the summer, there was not a topic that was more discussed than the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle campaign,” Brommer explained.
Those numbers are in contradiction to what was widely reported at the time. In fact, retail analytics firm pass_by said it was likely turning customers away from the company’s stores.
Pass_by uses AI technology and in-store sensors to measure footfall at American retailers. It found that American Eagle Outfitters store traffic dropped by 3.9 per cent in the week after the Sweeney campaign dropped, and a further 9 per cent the week after.
Another analysis by Consumer Edge shows that the hype around Sweeney’s campaign has substantially lifted visits to the American Eagle website, which jumped by 60 per cent in the days after the campaign dropped.
However, this reportedly did not translate to sales. Consumer Edge found that American Eagle’s US market share versus key competitors has been relatively stable, with no significant lift following either the campaign launch or the political news cycle.
Is All PR Good PR?
For Brommers, the key lesson was shifting the mindset to “optimising an opportunity” and away from managing a crisis. “If you change that mindset all of a sudden, you’re going to be doing different things, and you’re going to be leaning in to the opportunity, as opposed to leaning back and being reactive”.
He also advised CMOs not to listen to the noise surrounding their brand. “Don’t listen to the social media noise within reason. Listen to the data that is at your fingertips, in the moment. In this case, that definitely helped us”.
“I think that you really have to go back to what you were trying to do in the first place? And if you are beginning to accomplish some of those goals, you’re probably on the right path.
“Don’t listen to the crisis experts. Go with your gut and be informed by data. Make sure you’re doing it through your brand values, and I think that you can stick the landing if you do all those.”
Brommers said that there were a lot of reasons for people to react positively to this ad, and it is for this reason that Brommers was so “mystified” by the coverage from the advertising trade press.
“They were understandably, and I totally get it, writing quite negative stories, but when it was clear that we were not going to alter the campaign and we were going to execute it as originally intended, I was surprised that there wouldn’t be more articles or podcasts or something that said, well, what if this is working? What does that actually look like?”
Bound by the brand’s quiet period as a publicly traded company, American Eagle couldn’t release internal performance data even as the backlash headlines mounted. “There was mystery to that, but it also did hamper our ability to react to some just completely untrue stories,” Brommers said.
He believes the ad industry missed an opportunity to ask a bigger question: what if controversy was driving success rather than derailing it?
“It is so interesting that there wasn’t more of ‘what if this is working,’” he reflected. “Because I always thought that advertising was supposed to provoke, not provoke necessarily negatively, but provoke a conversation, provoke something. And so this campaign clearly did, and through that, I view it from a very positive lens.”
More Sydney On The Horizon?
While admitting that it is not the right time or place to make announcements, Brommers did hint that the Sweeney collaboration may not be a one-off.
“Our experience with Sydney has been the most exciting and most successful campaign in the history of the company,” he said. “We now have permission to take big swings, and we may even have the swagger to execute at a high level.”
“Our team, both from a product and marketing perspective, are developing a roadmap into 26 and beyond that, we’ll be jaw-dropping. The goal now is for people to be on the edge of their seats, thinking what is American Eagle going to do next? That question helps me be inspired every time I walk through the doors here at the American Eagle headquarters”.
So did Sydney Sweeney’s “jeans” do the numbers for American Eagle, or did it just
So did American Eagle win the denim wars? Brommers will have us believe yes, but in some places, the numbers just aren’t adding up. If one thing is clear, it’s that controversy still makes, but not always in the way brands expect it to.
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