“What model am I sporting?” Sydney Sweeney says, wanting into the digicam because the shutter snaps, revealing a rotation of summery denim appears. The temper immediately calms, her eyes shut, she takes a deep breath, seagulls name within the background. “Yeah, that one,” she says with a giggle.
The advert marks the return of probably the most infamous model partnerships in current reminiscence, as American Eagle launches a brand new marketing campaign to hype its denim shorts known as “Syd for Brief.” It’s a superbly nice, completely innocuous piece of name work meant to conjure the free-spiritedness of summertime (and, you understand, possibly make you overlook about—or at the least transfer on from—the last time Sweeney hawked denims for the retailer).
After I noticed the brand new work, I knew I wanted to speak to American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers about it. Brommers steered the model by way of final 12 months’s drama, when the web turned Sweeney’s “Great Jeans” spot right into a cultural lightning rod. He tells me the brand new marketing campaign has two main targets: First, and unsurprisingly, it desires to start out a brand new chapter within the model’s Sweeney partnership. Second, it desires to supply the Gen Z viewers a break from all of the noise that’s aimed its method.
“The world is fairly noisy proper now. Social media creates noise, geopolitical points create noise, and Gen Z talks about their psychological well being challenges and the way that’s creating noise for them,” Brommers says. Conversely, he says, the advert is about “turning down the exterior noise, embracing who you actually are, after which with the ability to dwell your life, particularly on this season—summer season—that Gen Z appears ahead to essentially the most all 12 months.”
The mellow vibe gives an intentional distinction to final 12 months’s marketing campaign. The place “Nice Denims” noticed Sweeney tapping right into a extra straight-faced, sultry model of herself, right here Syd is all straightforward smiles and playful laughs. American Eagle is aware of in addition to anybody that adverts can create noise, too, and it’s utilizing this second to take a quieter method.
So far as I do know, there’s no marketing guide for the right way to observe up an promoting marketing campaign that a lot of the web interpreted as eugenics propaganda dressed up like a pervy old Calvin Klein commercial. Do you lean into provocation? Do you play it secure? Do you ditch your tainted celeb spokesperson altogether?
With “Syd for Brief,” American Eagle is betting on one thing it believes will repay in the long term: model consistency.
Model noise
The waves of headlines labeling final 12 months’s American Eagle advert racist canine whistling, mixed with the counter waves declaring that response “woke” nonsense, caught the model itself in the course of that noise. Noise, thoughts you, that boosted the corporate’s buyer base by 700,000, helped its 2025 Q3 income bounce by 1% after two beforehand slumping quarters, and has since attracted 56 billion impressions, in keeping with Brommers.
However within the midst of that storm across the model, there have been selections to be made. Only a month after the Sweeney denims/genes spot dropped, Cracker Barrel unveiled a brand new brand that was shortly and enthusiastically panned by lots of its clients earlier than eventually being scrapped.
Entrepreneurs are largely identified to have the rigidity of a used car lot tube man in terms of swaying to public opinion. However Brommers was confronted with a serious divide between the unfavorable hot-take hype and the optimistic indicators he was seeing within the model’s precise information. And the latter knowledgeable the choice to stay with the work.
“The information that we checked out through the preliminary marketing campaign—throughout genders, geography, ethnicities, generations—for the overwhelming majority of each subset of each demographic, it wasn’t even shut,” Brommers says. “When you may have, at the least from my perspective, such a clear-cut case, and also you’re seeing actually optimistic response from the enterprise, that’s a case for consistency. It’s a case for transferring ahead.”
Maybe counterintuitively, individuals seem to respect a model for sticking with a stance, no matter whether or not they agree with it. Recent Ipsos Consumer Tracker data shows that 57% of American customers consider if a model takes a political stance, it ought to stick by that call, no matter client backlash. Brommers believes the identical will be stated for controversial partnerships.
Sydney vs. Syd
Mad Males creator Matthew Weiner has said that the present is in the end about our difficult relationship with promoting, and that promoting doesn’t create need; it merely displays the need we have already got. I’d argue you might say the identical for tradition, in that promoting doesn’t create it, however displays the place it’s at in any given second.
And for all the eye the unique Sweeney marketing campaign acquired from individuals at both finish of the political spectrum, it seems essentially the most important impression was felt from everybody in between—those that scrolled these takes and have become the “FFS, it’s simply denims” demographic.
Nonetheless, by its very tone, the brand new Syd marketing campaign is a transfer by the model to dial down the quantity, not solely to provide Gen Z’s ears a break but in addition its personal model picture.
“The very best model campaigns do determine an emotional fact, and there’s an emotional fact by way of line to what Sydney and American Eagle skilled collectively final fall, and what Gen Z tells us they’re experiencing proper now,” Brommers says. “It’s a brand new chapter in essentially the most profitable model marketing campaign within the historical past of American Eagle, however there’s a fixed demand to maintain it contemporary and hold the story transferring ahead. That’s why neither Sydney or American Eagle essentially needed to simply rehash what we had executed. It was vital for us to be collectively, and it was crucial to our buyer that Sydney remained within the storyline.”
The shift within the work can be mirrored within the variations between Sydney and Syd. Positive, there’s the wink-wink “Syd for Brief” to promote precise shorts, but it surely’s additionally a step away from the movie star of the earlier marketing campaign to one thing easier.
“When you consider Sydney Sweeney, the general public thinks concerning the particular person they see on the pink carpet, in box-office hits, in Emmy-winning exhibits. However there’s additionally Syd,” Brommers says. “Syd is actual, she’s informal, she’s assured. And Syd is somebody our buyer actually pertains to.”
American Eagle inventory closed out the week up practically 9% for the reason that new work launched on April 15. It’s a positive line to stroll for the model to keep up its consistency right here, totally proudly owning the final marketing campaign whereas very clearly attempting to maneuver on with out arising quick.
