Sydney Sweeney ad shows people have lost their minds

American Eagle is advertising jeans ...and nothing else

I wasn’t going to post about the Sydney Sweeney thing, but it’s now gone on long enough I feel we need to. Because even some people in my own sector who should understand advertising have completely lost their minds. Or maybe they were just unintentionally baited to reply. Or were bored. I don’t know. It’s an insane thing to be upset about.

You likely already saw the American Eagle ad: Sydney Sweeney in a pair of jeans does the postmodern/stylish talk to the camera thing. It’s just classic fashion advertising, nothing more, nothing less. People make puns in ads all the time. Sex in advertising sells. This is day one stuff.

You’re meant to chuckle. Probably notice her figure (again, it’s a fashion ad … they all do this!). Mostly, you’re meant to remember American Eagle still exists.

But, in the infinite attention casino that is the modern internet: people got mad.

And not just normal mad, but insane culture war mad. Which is of course faster, louder and dumber.

Having an attractive white woman in an ad is now, to people completely unmoored from reality, a Nazi dog whistle. If you wrote this into a movie 10 years ago people would have walked out of the theater. It’s all so tiresome. It’s also ridiculous, cartoon-level silly, basically commentary from what are the modern Puritans (which gave us the Salem Witch Trials - the people mad today about this ad today would have been front row, holding pitchforks).

And anyway, why are the only people who heard the supposed ‘dog whistle’ leftist extremists who make their living posting grievances online? Nearly every person in my replies (marketing pro or consumer) where I posted some of the outrage (go read it) was left scratching their heads. Normal people just don’t see it. Because there’s nothing to see. But when you’ve been trained that everything and everyone is racist, of course you see that everywhere, even in places it doesn’t exist. I’m surprised we don’t have a DSM-5 entry about this yet (but that whole field is also kind of lost here, too).

If you thought this campaign was somehow “problematic” - congrats, you are also on the same side as people on not just the far left but the woke right, who stated this campaign and company are actually Jew-coded, completing this week’s political horseshoe of insanity. So basically we have the extremes of both sides coalescing against a classic American brand. It makes sense. All the extremists hate normal, functioning parts of society.

Tweet source, another example of the moral inversion of the West

A short denim commercial has become a Rorschach test for terminally online brains rotted by grievance courses and unprocessed trauma. Some don’t understand that not everything is an attack on them, personally. That companies can feature whoever they want in ads (a celebrity, someone who nailed the audition) and that doesn’t make them racist. They just fit the vibe and were the most qualified. We don’t live in a Marxist, checkbox country where every ad has to feature a person from every background or it can’t be shipped. America doesn’t work like that.

But is the ad even any good? It’s really just a standard “hot celebrity, fashion pun, denim exists” kind of thing. Feels like an AI prompt come to life (would be amazing if the script was generated tbh). But it’s definitely not fascism. It’s just horny capitalism. There’s a difference. For fun, I even asked several AIs and they all agreed people are off the rails being upset at this, and noted the anger says more about the interpreter than the object (so, even the machines get it). Amusing to me as an ad pro, the same people that hate the Sydney Sweeney ad loved the Jaguar ad (and were doing backflips to justify it) that basically turned everyone off from the brand. One group understands the world and is living in base reality, the other is not.

Another internet comment, a nod to the ongoing attempted demoralization of society…

And yes, some people found the ad “too sexual,” which is another symptom of our national neurosis. The same culture that mainlined Cardi B’s WAP as female empowerment is now scandalized by a woman in tight jeans using a pun. Everyone has completely lost their minds. By the way, a woman leader at the company created the ad, not that it even matters.

Anyway, if you get your opinions from mainstream media outlets looking for clicks or TikTok posters looking for likes, you also are going to have a cartoon-mirror like understanding of reality. You’ll probably be depressed and anxious all the time too. All these people are miserable human beings and just exist to outrage-farm you for attention. It’s all part of the subprime attention bubble, don’t go down with that ship.

All the media stories about this is a total W for American Eagle, the so called “critics” are all professional outrage merchants, and everyone is wise to the game. NYPost of all places was one the only sane one.

What’s really going on here has nothing to do with eugenics, or semiotics, or some stealth Fourth Reich encoded in a department store ad. It’s about attention. These takes, whether pearl-clutching or mock-outraged, are attempts to hijack the ad’s cultural velocity for clout, as everything just gets fed through that filter now. Or maybe it was, and I quote from author Rob Henderson: “Intrasexual competition disguised as social justice activism.”

Even some posters on BlueSky of all places have had enough (source)

And ironically, all this noise makes the ad work. American Eagle hasn’t been relevant since teens were posting Bible quotes over pictures of sunsets on Tumblr. Now they’ve stumbled upon viral catnip merely by putting an attractive person in an ad. Or I would say: make the world normal again, which is decidedly what the cultural Marxists don’t want. They want everyone fighting over silly things. But all they accomplish here is every angry post is a free media buy. Every thread calling it fascist erotica is just more people Googling “Sydney Sweeney jeans ad.”

American Eagle is about to move product, not in spite of the outrage, but because of it. And for any consumer marketers reading this, take the free layup:

"Telos" is an Ancient Greek word that means "end," "goal," or "purpose." The telos of marketing isn’t to tick boxes for the self-anointed hall monitors of the world who are perpetually miserable, or even win awards from our peers. It’s to create conversation, build relevancy, reinforce the brand name and create customers and sales. I’m begging my peers to come back to this. And if anyone at American Eagle is reading this, don’t apologize to the hall monitors. No normal people like them anyway. Maybe they’ll lighten up soon, we’ll say a prayer.