American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers has no regrets about those Sydney Sweeney ads.
Despite customer backlash to the apparel brand’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign, which largely centered on the use of language that some described as racially coded, Brommers told us that AE’s most expensive campaign to date was money well spent.
“Sydney Sweeney is worth every single dollar that we invested,” he told Marketing Brew. “Every single marketing metric that I look at is flashing a green light, and we’re only six weeks in.”
The campaign, which launched in July, generated an “unprecedented spike” of 790,000 new customers acquired across every county in the US, Brommers said, in addition to nearly 320,000 new social followers, “denim sell outs,” and “strong, positive traffic.”
That stands in contrast to third-party data shared with Retail Brew last month that found that foot traffic was down 9% at American Eagle stores in the first week of August, and an Adweek report based on consumer transaction data that suggested online chatter did not lead to an immediate increase in sales. On its earnings call Wednesday, the brand reported positive increases in traffic in the month of August and a 2% increase in revenue through the end of the quarter on August 2, which CEO Jay Schottenstein said “exceeded [American Eagle’s] expectations.”
So far, Brommers told us, the Sweeney campaign has generated 40 billion impressions. He disputed claims suggesting that the language used in the American Eagle ad was rage-bait designed to generate clicks and views. Instead, the message was intended to “spark a conversation about optimism, confidence, and self-expression,” he said. “I think the results speak loudly that a broad base of customers understood that.”
After rocketing to national news due to the controversy, American Eagle has embraced its moment in the spotlight. Last week, the brand announced a clothing collaboration with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce as part of what Brommers called an effort to turn “buzz into business.”
“We wanted to work with talent who define culture,” Brommers said. “By partnering individually with Sydney Sweeney and then Travis Kelce, there is no question that we have the most talked-about marketing campaigns of the year.”
Doubling down
Looking back at the first month and half of the Sweeney campaign, Brommers said that “marketing can move culture, marketing can move product, [and] marketing can move stock prices. ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ certainly did all three of those.”
In response to accusations of racially insensitive language, Brommers said that the campaign “was always about the jeans,” which is the language the brand used on social media following the backlash in August. The brand’s response and decision to post a statement online responding to the backlash was about taking a moment to “ensure clarity” about the meaning behind the ad at the same time that positive performance data was rolling in behind the scenes, he said.
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According to Brommers, the Sydney denim jacket sold out in one day, and the Sydney Jean sold out in one week; there are plans to restock the jeans ahead of the holiday season.
“We have learned so much over these last six weeks,” he said. “Don’t always believe the negative hype machine, especially in social media. Listen to what your customer is saying and what your business performance is telling you.”
While some news outlets reported that American Eagle pulled some elements of the campaign from social media that had drawn ire (namely a video where Sweeney talks about genes being passed down from parents to offspring), Brommers told Marketing Brew that no elements of the campaign were removed entirely and that “every single asset that is supposed to be on the world is out in the world.”
“You have to have a certain mindset when you’re in the middle of all this noise, and the mindset that we had to choose between was, ‘Are you managing a crisis or are you optimizing an opportunity?’” he said. “We chose the latter.”
True colors
American Eagle is continuing to seize on its moment in the media through a collaboration with Kelce’s streetwear brand Tru Kolors, which was announced a day after Kelce and Taylor Swift announced their engagement. The timing was certainly opportune, but Brommers said the launch was a year in the making and not tied to the big news. According to Brommers, AE x TK drove three times more sales in one day than past American Eagle collaborations did in a week, not including Sydney Sweeney, and a second product drop coming soon.
Similar to Sweeney, Brommers credited Kelce’s cultural impact and cross-gender appeal for the success and said the next era of American Eagle’s marketing will be centered on engaging the brand’s newest customers acquired from both campaigns.
Immediately after the Q2 earnings were reported, American Eagle’s stock jumped 25%. Advertising expenses from both campaigns are expected to hit in the next quarter, according to the earnings call.
“A brand campaign cannot be measured in one month,” Brommers said. “We will be judged ultimately on the success of this full quarter and the success of our remaining fiscal year…so really it’s about our quarter-to-date momentum and how we build from here.”