American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney campaign - what really happened with CMO Craig Brommers

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, it would be impossible for you not to have heard of the brand American Eagle and their collaboration with Sydney Sweeney that hit the news early this year. A lot of people have asked me about what happened, what really went on in that crisis and how the brand reacted. Well, I am meeting the person in charge, Craig Bromers, who is the CMO of American Eagle, to find out exactly what happened and what they're doing and what we can learn from their experience. Here it is. Craig, welcome to the show. John, privileged to be here. Well, you're looking great, by the way.

0:37Can I ask you what you're wearing? I quite like your top. I am wearing a new denim piece from our Travis Kelsey collaboration. We just launched the True Colors American Eagle collaboration in late August. And this is one of the new pieces. And I'm loving it. Very soft and very denim focused. You've got a great job. You know, just Sydney Sweeney one minute, Travis Kelsey the next. Did he get involved in the design of that? Very much. So we met Travis more than a year ago, and Travis does have a brand called True Colors, and he's very hands-on. He and his team were in this office picking out trims for the product, picking up colors, working through fits with us.

1:18So, yes, he was extremely involved. It's nice to know that. I bumped into him in Cannes, actually, this year. He's much bigger in real life than you realize. I suppose when you watch the football, they're all big, aren't they? So they kind of level each other out. But he's a tall guy, isn't he? Yeah, tall guy and a great guy. I mean, talk about his kindness, his authenticity. He seems like a regular guy. He really does. And it's hard to imagine that because he is constantly in the spotlight. But it was such a privilege to work with him and his team for this collaboration. Now, he's used to being in the spotlight, of course.

1:54You might not be quite as used to being in the spotlight, but of course you have been. And I wonder, what is it about this day and age where brands seem to be able to blow up in the way that they do? We've had Cracker Barrel recently. We had Jaguar last year. We had Bud Light. What is going on in culture that means sometimes a brand ends up becoming talked about in the way that you guys have? I think, John, we need to backtrack a little bit and remember what we were trying to do with this campaign. We were trying to partner with the It Girl of 2025 to create the It Jeans campaign of 2025. I think it's safe to say mission accomplished.

2:32When you cast someone like Sydney Sweeney, you know that it's going to be in the spotlight. Sydney is a cross-generational talent. She appeals to both genders. She is someone that dresses up. There is not a red carpet that doesn't love Sidney Sweeney, but she also feels like the girl next door and very relatable. She loves to work on cars. She loves to be in the outdoors. And there is no doubt that she is the it girl in the U.S. in 2025 and probably after this campaign now the it girl of the globe. And so we knew that this was going to get some response. obviously the response was beyond our wildest dreams and it was certainly the most fascinating eight weeks in my professional career.

3:21I can well imagine. I can well imagine. Was there anything in the build-up to this that kind of gave you any indication of how it was going to blow up in the way that it did? Well I think again having Sydney in the campaign was already going to cause a sensation and did cause a sensation right. We'll probably unpack it more in just a moment, but the day of the announcement of the campaign, our stock went up 25 % just on the announcement alone that Sydney was part of this campaign. And so people were immediately fascinated. How did they get her? What is the creative behind this? What is the message behind that?

3:59So, you know, for the first three or four days of the campaign, it really was through this unbelievably positive perception of, boy, American Eagle was able to partner with Sidney Sweeney. They're bringing their A game for this fall season. And then things got a little bit spicier, right? So we knew that, again, casting Sidney was going to create a sensation and it did right out of the gate. Now, what was the point? Because I mean, I started following this quite closely because it was fascinating to watch it unfold. And you're quite right. For the first three days, it appears entirely positive, as you say.

4:35Big news, you're collaborating with Sydney, share price up. And then suddenly this conversation switched into a wild territory of racism, eugenics, and it just went down this dark path. What happens to cause a sudden sort of, you know, reaction in that way? I am still a little bit dumbfounded, because I think the claims are absurd. And I think a vast majority of Americans understand that the claims are absurd. It was always about the genes. And this was Sydney's story in her genes. And of course, we always are telling new stories and will continue to tell new stories focused around genes. And so it was a curveball that we didn't see coming and certainly created another interesting narrative in the launch of the campaign.

5:29Yeah. I suppose it was the pun, wasn't it? The twist on jeans and jeans that caused that. Was there any indication of that in any of the testing you did before that might have suggested people might take that? Not at all. In that kind of route? No, not at all. And again, based on what we now know, right, customer performance, business performance, advertising performance, I think that's how a vast majority of people took the campaign. This was always about the genes, will always be about the genes. And that's how most people saw it. But of course, it went into something much broader and much bigger than that.

6:08Yeah. I put it through our system one test actually just to see because we measure like emotional response and why people feel how they feel. And it was really interesting because it plays out exactly actually what you just said there. We picked up about 10 percent negativity. Now, by the way, the average negativity on any campaign is about 6 percent. So just a little bit more negativity than normal. But in the comments and we've tested hundreds and hundreds of people, you know, through we've tested. I tested a number of times, actually, just to make sure this is correct. I didn't get anything about racism or eugenics or even objectification.

6:43The worst I saw was Sydney looks a bit aloof in it or is a bit slightly weird construct. That was it. On the positive side, a lot of people going Sydney Sweeney, lots of confidence, looks great in her jeans. They look comfortable to wear. So certainly from our point of view, and we were testing a big sample size, we couldn't see anything that connected back to the backlash. John, I'm not surprised to hear that at all. And again, I think that's how most people took the campaign. But there were clearly a lot of conversation in social media and in the mainstream press that took it into other territory.

7:19I think there's two interesting things here. One is, why are people doing that? And then the second thing is, what do you do when it happens, right? So any hypothesis on why people chose to sort of like misinterpret the campaign or use it for their kind of political commentary? I really don't, because, again, I can't be clear. The campaign was always about the genes. And so I'm actually not sure to this day of why people went there. But I think the reaction to that reaction is where American Eagle potentially won this this genes season. because I think that is a really interesting story. Exactly.

8:00I mean, this is what I found fascinating because so many brands tend to sort of like apologize, capitulate, clarify what they meant. And actually what you did is you held very firm to the plan you had in place. How did it feel? Because it can't have been a nice position to be in. And I imagine you must have got a lot of, you know, a lot of people who work here obviously would have seen what was going on. What was the decision making like internally when the sort of backlash started? How did you then respond to that point? What's funny, John, because as I was going through this experience, it almost felt like I was living in alternate universes.

8:37Because on one side, we're looking at very encouraging business performance, customer performance, and as I just mentioned, advertising performance. Obviously, the stock market had reacted quite positively to the campaign as well. And so those are the real-time facts. That's data points that we're looking at, feeling quite confident about what we have. But in the other universe, you're hearing all the noise in social media. The mainstream press is beginning to pick it up as well. And so the two universes didn't honestly compute in my mind. I just didn't quite understand how these were connected.

9:15And it was an out-of-body experience to read some of the so-called expert advice that we were getting from external people, again, in the press or in social media, of how to react and what to do. And I actually think that we landed in a very good place with this campaign because we actually trusted what was true and hard fact. I will say I had 1 ,000 % support from our CEO, 1 ,000 % support from our board. And so that gave me confidence as well. And what we did instead of racing to react is we actually just sat back for a second and gathered more data and understood what was going on with the business and with the campaign.

10:12before we made our first and only statement of the entire period. And that feels anthemic to what other people said that we should do. We should come out and react to do or clarify or whatever it was. We didn't see that there was anything to clarify. Like people were really into this campaign. And there was one and only one day of net negative social sentiment. And that was the Monday after the launch. So we launched this on a Wednesday, the Monday, which you're referencing is kind of when things got a bit spicier. But throughout this entire experience, any assertion that says this campaign was swamped by negative sentiments is patently untrue.

10:57And that was also a bit surprising of some of the mainstream press that you were reading, especially in the advertising trades. This was things that they could have easily run themselves. That's why it was surprising that some of those articles were actually so harsh when the data that we were seeing was quite positive. Yeah. You're so right, actually. Like, we like to really have a go at brands, don't we? And then everyone sort of follows on like a big pile on, you know, a bit like Cracker Barrel, actually. I have to say I've got a lot of sympathy for them because, you know, as soon as they got some sort of backlash, and in fact, a lot of it apparently was bot-driven as well.

11:37and then suddenly once one person criticizes it feels that everyone like follows in behind this herd mentality just comes and it becomes a you know gets life of its own but it sort of reminds me that the old advice that twitter is not real life i mean it's x now but you know we've got to distinguish between what blows up on social media and becomes just a reaction to the reaction versus actually what do our consumers think and feel who are ultimately the most important so credit to you actually because it's good to see you holding the line and maybe not doing what I think a lot of comms consultants might have advised you to do actually because if I think back to crisis I've been in you know get on the front foot react quickly but I think actually pausing and going let's let's watch this play out and hold the line is is credit to you.

12:20I think it worked really well for us and and that honestly allowed other voices to be heard and I think more and more people seem to be reacting that this is a little bit absurd. I can't imagine a brand as rich in tradition as American Eagle would set out to do something that would have these kinds of claims against it. Wednesday we launched. That's the incredible reaction in the stock market. Monday was probably the spiciest day. And then fast forward to Friday, which is roughly eight, nine days after launch, we came out with our one and only statement working with Sydney's team. And it was beloved.

13:05I mean, people really liked our response. And of course, the response was to clarify that it has always been about the genes and to make sure that people understood that we were going to execute this campaign as originally intended because I knew the very next day that this campaign would be on the sphere in Las Vegas. And that was going to create a stir as well. And so I think that was an important day for us, a well-received day for us. And I think that, you know, we were able then to execute other things that we had always intended. How many of the comments did you read yourself? I mean, your LinkedIn became swamped after a while as well, didn't it, with commentary?

13:48Yeah, you know what? I actually turned it off because I needed to actually isolate noise from fact. And to your point, I was confused. I was disappointed. I was frustrated when I was reading some of the initial barrage of LinkedIn comments on, again, that Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. And I said, you know what, Craig, you don't need to listen to this right now because we knew what we were intending to execute. We knew that the initial business results were quite encouraging. And I'm just not going to play that game right now. I'm just going to focus on what we need to focus on. We need to focus on executing the campaign at the highest level possible.

14:31I need to focus on being the best leader possible for not only our marketing team, but the best leader possible for our corporation. And so everyone really understood what we were trying to execute. And we needed to be the best possible partners to Sydney Sweeney, because the reality is this was always supposed to be a talent partnership. And to her credit, she stuck with us. And, you know, you better be damn certain that we were going to stick with her. And it soon became very apparent that not only does Sydney Sweeney have great genes, Sydney Sweeney can sell great genes because the sales were unbelievably encouraging out of the gate.

15:10Well, I'd love to talk about that because that, of course, everyone was going, you know, it's either going to be the death of you or it's going to be the making of you. I'd love to know what was the reality in terms of sales, you know, interest in the brands that followed from the campaign? Yeah. So as a publicly traded company, when we came out with our Q2 earnings on September 3rd, which is roughly six weeks after the launch of the campaign, we indicated that their initial results from Q3 were quite encouraging. A couple things that that your listeners should hear we gained 1 million new customers in the course of those six weeks that's unheard of unprecedented yeah so what a normal base of customer bay but normally this is much lower and so this is an unprecedented run for us we also saw the highest brand demand for American Eagle in 20 years think about that for a second that's amazing things that Sydney war we're selling out either your first day or first week I mean things were were blowing out.

16:10We saw a double digit traffic increase. And so you're seeing all of this, you know, very positive results coming through the campaign. Now, listen, you and I both know a brand campaign is going to be judged over a longer period of time, right? And so that first six week period was by far the most fascinating, by far the most intensive, but this continues, right? This was always supposed to be a brand and business reset. It has been. And now the work of the work continues, the work of the work to shift the buzz into new customers and to shift those new customers into repeat customers. But there is no doubt that the initial reaction to the campaign is beyond our wildest dreams.

16:52Yeah. You mentioned being on the sphere in Las Vegas, which is kind of cool. Have you worked out how much of the reach you got was actually due to the reaction versus the media buy? Because I'm guessing the amount of people that are now talking about American Eagle compared to before, must be way more than the actual media buy that you did. Listen, John, we're closing in 45 billion impressions for the campaign. And to your point, that's a mix of paid and organic. And YouTube has told me that this campaign has been seen on their platform alone eight times more than Beyonce and Levi's, which is astounding, right?

17:25And so I think it just underscores the fact that this thing just blew up and was much bigger than my industry, was much bigger than the advertising industry. This became a cultural phenomenon that everyone was talking about and everyone had an opinion about. And I think that the exciting thing for us is when we set out to partner with Sydney, we didn't just want to participate in culture. We actually wanted to define culture. And I know that that sounds like a hollow statement coming from a CMO, but damn it, we did it, right? We actually did define culture in the late part of the summer. There was not a topic that was more discussed than the Sidney Sweeney American Eagle campaign.

18:12Yeah. It also shows that creating a reaction, even if it's negative for some, actually is the amplification of it as well. I was trying to think actually before this, what's the closest I've come to the situation you found yourself in? And this is going back about 20 years, but I was a young brand manager. And do you have De Siron Amaretto here in America? We probably do, but I wouldn't be an expert, yeah. It's like an almond-flavored liqueur. You have it in coffee or a lot of it in cocktails, that sort of thing. And I think I was doing my first brand manager job, and I thought I've got to do something to really stand out.

18:47And I worked with the London Underground to develop the smell of liqueur. It's a very distinctive almond smell. and I came up with the idea of pumping the smell through the underground so when people are you know getting on and off of the of the tube they can smell the the liqueur interesting and then I took over on all the escalator panels I wrapped them so that it was completely wrapped in the branding yeah and then as you left you got a miniature little tiny sample it so you smelt it you saw it and you could taste it something and it was in the four weeks run up to Christmas sounds good but I think there's a dot there is a dot this is one of those timing is everything stories because this is 2002 and we, I say we, the US and UK are about to go to war with Iraq.

19:31And Tony Blair is in Parliament basically justifying that Saddam Hussein's got weapons of mass destruction. Anyway, it's very, very heightened at the time. The day the campaign went live, every newspaper ran a headline that said the Home Office warned the public to look out for cyanide attacks on the underground. and in brackets the sign of cyanide the smell of almonds no yeah oh that is a crisis so i i i was at some trade christmas trade show it was like a christmas trade show and i was there sort of you know doing some sampling and my phone had just like i just missed all these calls and almost every journalist from every major newspaper was trying to get a quote and so i ended up becoming i ended up being on the news to try and just because of course they thought this was this was a stunt that I was doing on purpose.

20:20Now I was like, I've been planning this for six months. The London Underground have had to sign it off. I didn't come up with it this morning. You know what I mean? So it's different between perception and reality. This is a long standing thing. But the thing that you reminded me as you talked about the sales reaction is we had our best Christmas ever. And even in the biggest newspaper in Italy ran with the story of how we shut the London Underground down sort of thing. And even the owner of the company was on the phone to me going, what just happened? But it's just wild. Sometimes all PR is good PR in that sense.

20:55It could be. And that's why in this fascinating experience, I was mystified that the advertising trades were not telling that part of the story. They were, understandably, and I totally get it, writing quite negative stories. But when it was clear that we were not going to alter the campaign and we were going to execute it as originally intended, I was surprised that there wouldn't be more articles or podcasts or something that said, well, what if this is working? Like, what does that actually look like? We were in a so-called quiet period. And for your listeners, many of them who may be Brits may not understand that in a quiet period, a public company cannot release any business information.

21:39And so there was mystery to that, but it also did hamper our ability to react to some just completely untrue stories. But it is so interesting that there wasn't more of what if this is working? So I don't know. I mean, I just, I found that very interesting because I always thought that advertising was supposed to provoke. Now, provoke does not necessarily mean negatively, but provoke a conversation, provoke something. And so this campaign clearly did. And through that, I view it from a very positive lens. Yeah. I wonder what you have, because you've got like Jaguar had the same experience last year when they did their campaign.

22:21And it's too early to sell because they're not selling the car yet. So we'll have to wait for another year or two to find out. But I think they're in a similar situation where although they caused a reaction and got a bit of a backlash, actually everyone's talking about them and the interest in the car has never been higher. But what would your advice be because I think what's interesting about this is the fact that you held the course in the crisis and and by the way I think most people would have found it very hard because you just just reading your LinkedIn or reading Twitter etc etc you can see you know the vitriol that's out there by some people right they go they're going quite hard for you but you held the course and you didn't look back sort of thing and I think that's interesting because I think other companies will look back at this and go hang on a minute you know it pays to to see it through and not kind of react in the way that most comms consultants would suggest.

23:07So I'm intrigued to know what you would take and what your advice would be to other marketers facing a similar thing. I want to answer that, John, and I want to say this first, is what I realized through this experience is there's no two experiences that are similar, right? And so I'm going to tell you what I learned through this experience and how it helped us through. But it's very hard because I'm not in the seat of the Jaguar CMO. I'm not in the seat of the Bud Light CMO. I'm not in the seat of whatever the next crisis or scandal du jour is. And I really believe that that CMO and his or her team are owed the respect of we don't understand the full picture.

23:50And they have access to data that I wouldn't have. But in this case, I actually think it started with a mindset. And I think what we did in this process is we were not managing a crisis. We were actually optimizing an opportunity. And so if you change that mindset, all of a sudden you're going to be doing different things and you're going to probably be leaning in to the opportunity as opposed to leaning back and being reactive. So I think that's one thing. What's your mindset through this? Two, and this is the most obvious one, don't listen to the noise. Don't listen to the social media noise within reason.

24:31Listen to the data that is in your fingertips in the moment. In this case, that definitely helped us. I mentioned it before. If you're in a talent partnership, it has to go both ways. And it was very important for me to be able to tell Sydney and her team that we are sticking with this. We are sticking with you and we will execute this as we all originally intended. I think that was extremely important. And I think that, you know, the final thing is you really have to go back to what were you trying to do in the first place? And if you are beginning to accomplish some of those goals, you're probably on the right path.

25:11And at the top of the pod here, you and I talked about what we were trying to do. And I would say, check, mission accomplished on all of that. And then I think that in terms of just managing through something like this, I really think we had a very small, very tight team on this. Like I'm talking like four or five people that were in the trenches together. We were given the grace of total confidence from the board and from our CEO and from other cross-functional partners here at American Eagle. And that made the job easier because I didn't have to manage other things through that. We were just managing through the moment as a very, very tight team.

25:54So I think that is what is. And then, like I said, don't listen to the crisis experts. Go with your gut and be informed with data. Make sure you're doing it through your brand values. And I think that you can stick the landing if you do all those. that's very well put it reminded me a little bit of um there's a i don't know if you read the jim collins book good to great yes the follow-up great by choice he talks about um the most successful companies it's not that they had any more luck or either good or bad than their competitors it's entirely how they reacted to that and i think that's the interesting thing here is like something like this will happen a handful of times in most people's careers and what matters is how you use it.

26:43I love the fact you reframed it. It's not a crisis, it's an opportunity. I mean, that's really, really powerful. And the data from good to great would suggest that's exactly what you did. I love that, John. And again, I think the reaction to the reaction is what potentially won those first eight weeks. I think that the way that we navigated those moments showed clarity, showed focus, showed confidence. And I think that that was heartening for our customers and heartening for new customers and then clearly heartening for many people that were commenting about this campaign. Yeah, I think I know the answer to this question, because you alluded to it a little bit earlier, but are you planning to use Sydney more in future campaigns?

27:23Are we going to see more of her collaborating with you? Not the right time, right place to make any announcements, but our experience with Sydney has been the most exciting and most successful campaign in the history of the company. So that would be amazing. And I think that we now have permission to take big swings. And we may even have the swagger to execute at a high level. And I know our team, both from a product and marketing perspective, are developing a roadmap into 26 and beyond that will be jaw dropping. And I think that the goal now is for people to be on the edge of their seat of what is American Eagle going to do next?