It’s maybe the sharpest of promoting’s double-edged swords: manufacturers quest endlessly for consideration, however aren’t all the time pleased with the type of consideration they get.
The final two weeks have served up a textbook instance of this paradox—actress Sydney Sweeney’s coquettish collection of adverts for American Eagle Outfitters, which turned quite a lot of heads and likewise curled quite a lot of lips.
It was one particular advert that did it. In a stylistic invocation of Brooke Shields’ well-known 1980 adverts for Calvin Klein denims, Sweeney slipped into her jeans whereas speaking to the digital camera in regards to the significance of getting good denims.
Or was it genes? Truly, it was each. And the model’s willingness to slide suggestively between these two homophones prompted some to cost it with espousing debunked theories round racial superiority and waxing nostalgic for eugenics.
Hindsight is a blessing in instances like this, after all, and also you don’t want quite a lot of it. American Eagle launched the advert, pulled the advert, then issued an announcement explaining the advert—all inside a nine-day interval.
On this episode of Adspeak, Adweek editor-in-chief Ryan Joe and senior editor Robert Klara talk about the Sweeney conflagration with the good thing about the embers having been (largely) extinguished. It’s a chance to ask some questions that felt too huge for the warmth of the second. Amongst them: Why have been so many individuals so upset, anyway? Was the Sweeney marketing campaign a sufferer of public anger, or was it courting it? And what does the marketing campaign inform us in regards to the historic function of controversy itself?
