Several industry leaders, including Mark Ritson have responded to the backlash to an American Eagle advertising campaign starring Sydney Sweeney.
The campaign, ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’, is a series of videos of Sweeney dressed up in a full denim outfit discussing how great her genes are.
Yesterday, B&T reported that while the Sydney Sweeney collaboration had led to a 12 per cent surge in American Eagle’s stock price, it has faced fierce criticism from inclusive marketing experts, including Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel and Lola Bakare, who described the campaign as racist and a nod to Nazi eugenics theory.
Following the backlash, American Eagle has pulled one video in which Sweeney says that her jeans are blue from several of its online channels, including YouTube and Instagram., while also sharing iterations with a black American model.
Not all prominent industry leaders have slated the ad, in fact some are surprised by the level of the backlash.
On LinkedIn, brand consultant and marketing professor Mark Ritson asked: ‘Have we lost our collective minds?’.
“It’s an average ad for a fading brand featuring a hot celebrity. Others may choose to see all kinds of insidious extra motives. Theirs is an authentic interpretation. Like everyone else’s. But this is the reader’s perception, not the author’s intent. Surely sanity will prevail?,” he wrote.
“Whatever the furore to follow. It’s going to be a successful ad for the brand. There is such a thing as bad publicity for a brand. Ask Elon. But this is not it.
“Nothing in this ad runs against American Eagles brand positioning. The crisis about to emerge is coming from external narratives not internal errors. And the relatively minor status of the American Eagle brand for most current fashion buyers means that whatever the company loses in sales from a few super radical trendies, it will surely win a hundred fold back from consumers who don’t care, don’t see any of the nonsense but who are suddenly aware and readily salient for a brand that they never thought of before.”
IDENTITY Communications managing director Santosh Murthy told B&T he believes the ad is designed to be “tongue in cheek”, but the campaign could have been more inclusive.
“I think it will be less effective to those it doesn’t represent possibly, but I don’t share in the outrage,” he said.
“This type of representation in creative has been going on forever. If they had versions with other races and genders, sure that would be more inclusive.
“However they are appealing to heartland America – not all Americans, and that’s a key audience distinction they’ve made and one that’s reflective of the nature of the market. We often forget just how far right parts of America are.”
Sheba Nandkeolyar, the CEO of MultiConnexions Group and president of IAA Australia, said that brands should be aware of the cultural and social context in which campaigns are received — not just intended.
“There is always potential to trigger legitimate concerns around race, exclusion, and outdated ideals that have no place in modern advertising. Today’s audiences are diverse, globally aware, and rightly expect authenticity and inclusivity. Cultural testing is a great step for any campaign before it goes live,” she said.
“When brands get inclusivity right, they build genuine trust, deeper engagement, and long-term loyalty across diverse audiences. Authentic representation isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic marketing and business imperative. Audiences can quickly detect tokenism or outdated narratives, and the backlash can be swift. Brands that listen, reflect real stories, and respect lived experiences are the ones that truly resonate — and stand the test of time.”
Calvin Klein Playbook: ‘The Problem’
Lisa Braun Dubbels, the CEO of Catalyst Publicity and Promotion Group, pointed out the ad follows the same playbook as a Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad in the 1980s, and “That’s the problem”.
“I came of age during the Brooke Shields era. I remember when fashion dictated not just what to wear, but who you were allowed to be. So when I see this campaign, I’m not seeing empowerment. I’m seeing a repackaged version of the same old gaze—now with slightly different casting,” she said.
Tricia Melton, a former marketing chief at Warner Bros. and Disney Entertainment, believes the campaign is as scandalous today as the Calvin Klein Brook Shields spot.
“This campaign is a very specific kind of choice—especially right now, in a country grappling with real, painful cultural fault lines around race, identity, and privilege. At best, it’s tone-deaf. At worst, it feels like it stumbled out of a focus group hosted in 1983 and accidentally landed in a time machine headed straight into the most fractured era in modern American life,” she wrote.
“The campaign is clearly an homage to the infamous Calvin Klein Brooke Shields ads from the ’80s—you know, the ones that featured a 15-year-old girl asking what comes between her and her Calvins (spoiler: nothing).
“That campaign was scandalous then. Now, amid the public resurfacing of the Epstein list and a renewed reckoning with the exploitation of young women, it’s not exactly the nostalgic vibe one might want to evoke.”
Melton, who is the co-founder and principal of Pith & Pixie Dust, also believes that Gen Z isn’t buying it.
“For a generation fluent in irony, allergic to insincerity, and raised on a steady diet of digital discernment, this campaign feels like a millennial marketer’s idea of what was once considered edgy,” she said.
“The pun (genes/jeans) isn’t clever so much as it is clunky. And when paired with a blonde, blue-eyed actress talking about “great genes,” it begins to trip wires no one asked to be tripped.”
