The Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad didn’t just sell jeans – it sold a narrow ideal. Sian Conway-Wood of 181st Street Communications calls time on an industry that claims influence when it suits, and shrugs it off when it doesn’t.
Sydney Sweeney for American Eagle
The advertising industry loves to say that we reflect culture. We decode semiotics. We explain to clients how color, framing and casting trigger emotion and memory. We sell symbolism as strategy.
And yet, when those same techniques reinforce uncomfortable truths – about beauty, identity, or power – we suddenly lose our nerve. We shrug, deflect or dismiss. It’s ‘just a commercial’ we say. Just a coincidence.
But if you work in advertising and still think it’s just an ad, then you’ve fundamentally misunderstood your own profession.
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Let’s be honest. We don’t just mirror norms – we manufacture them. We decide what’s aspirational. What’s desirable? What belongs.
We are not in the business of decoration. We are in the business of perception – of engineering desire, attention, meaning. We can’t claim credit for brand salience on Monday and plead ignorance to cultural influence on Tuesday.
Advertising accelerates ideas into standards. Repeat something enough times with enough budget, and it doesn’t just become visible, it becomes true. It becomes a normative value – ideas about beauty, success, belonging, and desirability aren’t just shown in ads, but validated by them.
And that’s the real story behind the recent American Eagle campaign – not the denim, not the celebrity, but the industrial-scale shrug from many in our industry who claim to champion effectiveness, yet pretend advertising exists in a vacuum.
It doesn’t. And when we ignore that, we fail not only our audiences but also the craft itself.
Let’s quickly recap. The controversial campaign featured Sydney Sweeney – blonde, blue-eyed, sunlit Americana personified – on a billboard that read: “Sydney Sweeney has great genes”, with “genes” crossed out and replaced with “jeans”. In a campaign video, she lies back while narrating a short lesson about inherited genetic traits: “hair colour, personality, eye colour” before closing with: “My jeans are blue.”
For some, this was harmless ‘just a commercial’ punning. But for others, particularly in a political environment shaped by white grievance backlash, DEI rollbacks, and polarization, it felt like a whistle to something far less innocent. Established voices in the industry dismissed concerns as hysterical, arguing that any harmful interpretation was the audience’s problem, not the brand’s.
Whether or not it was intentional is irrelevant. The signal had already been sent.
When the inevitable backlash came, the industry’s response was depressingly familiar: It’s an overreaction. Don’t be so emotional. It’s just denim.
But if you work in advertising, you don’t get to use the ‘just an ad’ excuse. Our entire profession is built on the premise that ads work. So when they work in the wrong direction, we’re still responsible.
Advertising, whether we like it or not, is a cultural pollinator. Brands are society’s billboards of values. If we believe we can make people care about a burger more with a color palette or a typeface, then we must also accept that we can make them care less about each other with what we normalize in mass media.
When a campaign normalizes a narrow ideal, and the industry rallies to defend it, we’re not doing strategy. We’re doing selective blindness. The argument that this campaign is “good for the brand, just look at the share price,” assumes the only thing that matters is short-term attention. But there’s a mountain of evidence that says otherwise.
Let’s be clear: inclusion isn’t a ‘woke’ agenda; it’s a growth strategy. Decades of research, from Les Binet and Peter Field to contemporary market studies, confirm that the most effective advertising reaches the broadest possible audience. Large brands grow and continue to dominate by increasing penetration, not by preaching to a niche choir.
We have enough data now to say this unequivocally: inclusive advertising performs better. The research isn’t ambiguous; it’s a commercial mandate.
Dr Ben Barry’s landmark study from Cambridge University on model diversity provides staggering figures. He found that when women saw models who reflected their own size, age, or race, their purchase intentions skyrocketed.
Purchase intentions increased by over 200% when women saw models who were their own size.
For Black consumers, seeing a Black model made them 1.5 times more likely to purchase a product.
Conversely, when women saw models who did not reflect their size, their purchase intentions decreased by 60%.
This isn’t an isolated finding. Research from the Geena Davis Institute and WPP confirms that representative campaigns can drive significantly higher ROI. Meanwhile, ITV and System1’s Feeling Seen report demonstrated that ads that authentically represent diverse groups score higher in emotional resonance, memorability, and long-term brand favorability. The science is clear: people buy from brands that see them.
When a campaign deploys exclusionary visuals, it does more than offend a few people on social media. It sends a clear signal to a vast portion of the market: we’re not for you. Even ignoring the moral critique, this is bad advertising. It shrinks your audience. It alienates the majority. And it builds noise you cannot control. Most alienated customers don’t complain; they just disappear.
This is particularly relevant in the US, where the campaign is running. The country is less than 60% non-Hispanic white. Among Gen Z, that number drops to just over 50%. In that context, plastering a single, narrow aesthetic across your entire media budget isn’t ‘brand salience.’ It’s commercial tunnel vision.
We know this. We say it in every pitch deck.
In the 1950s, advertisers created the modern teenage consumer. In the 1970s, they turned Ford models into markers of status. And for decades, advertising has reinforced a singular image of beauty that still dominates buses, billboards and algorithmic feeds.
The argument that ‘it’s just an ad’ willfully ignores the immense power our industry wields. In the UK alone, advertisers spent over £39bn in 2024. To suggest this fire hose of capital has no effect on social norms is to suggest we are all failing at our jobs.
If advertising didn’t work to shape belief, we wouldn’t have political campaign spending caps. If it didn’t change behavior, governments wouldn’t run anti-smoking or healthy eating campaigns. If it didn’t create normative values, the ASA wouldn’t have just banned an M&S ad for promoting unrealistic beauty ideals.
This is the science of normative values: what people see repeatedly, they perceive as normal and socially acceptable. Normative values don’t emerge from one campaign. They emerge from repetition. From a system that says this is what beauty looks like, what success looks like, what intelligence and authority look like.
So when we put a thin, white, blue-eyed woman on a billboard in 2025 and say this is what ‘good genes’ looks like, we’re not just echoing culture – we’re endorsing it, and all the connotations that come with. And when we defend it? We’re not building brand equity. We’re building blind spots.
This isn’t about being offended. It’s about choosing to ignore what 70 years of advertising theory, cultural semiotics, and consumer behavior have already told us: repetition makes ideas stick. What gets repeated, gets reinforced. What gets reinforced, becomes real.
Some have argued that this entire discourse is overblown. That criticism is sanctimonious. That the reaction is disconnected from intent. But this framing misses the point entirely.
As advertisers, we’re not the morality police. But we are stewards of the cultural landscape. Our job isn’t to moralize but to sell effectively, broadly and responsibly. That means understanding how signals are received in a fractured, hyper-mediated environment. It means anticipating interpretation. It means not accidentally echoing dog-whistle tropes and then calling it ‘average copywriting.’
This isn’t a neutral stance; it’s a professional failure. It’s an abdication of our core responsibility to understand cultural context and mitigate commercial risk. There are certain third rails in cultural symbolism – swastikas, racial slurs, and yes, the aesthetic of eugenics – that competent strategists avoid. This isn’t about being politically correct; it’s about being professionally competent.
To dismiss valid semiotic readings as ‘hysteria’ is to reject the very tools of our trade. It’s like a master carpenter refusing to believe a spirit level. We don’t have to make the world better. But we have a duty not to make it worse.
Day one of advertising school: Know your audience. Don’t accidentally promote Nazi shit.
This defensive logic implies that intention is all that matters. But if that were true, we wouldn’t have codes of conduct. We wouldn’t have a regulatory body like the ASA at all.
The global advertising industry is projected to spend over $1tn in 2025. We are hired on the assumption that messages matter. If we deny that power when it makes us uncomfortable, we have no business claiming it when it sells.
If showing the same idealized body shape, skin tone, and facial symmetry 50 times across 50 brands isn’t a form of indoctrination, then neither is a healthy eating campaign. But of course it is. That’s the whole point.
Advertising doesn’t just sell. It sets standards. And we’re either raising them or we’re lowering them. If we want our work to live in the culture, we must accept the responsibility that comes with it. To pretend otherwise isn’t just intellectually dishonest – it’s a dereliction of professional duty.
We don’t need to cancel anyone. We just need to recalibrate.
Ground strategy in commercial reality. Inclusivity drives growth. Exclusion shrinks markets.
Respect the science of influence. Acknowledge and plan for our impact on normative values.
Treat cultural literacy as a core competency, not an optional extra.
Advertising doesn’t need to be earnest. But it needs to be awake.
The debate around this ad was never really about jeans. It was about the standards we hold ourselves to as professionals. Are we here to build resonant, inclusive and effective brands for the long term? Or are we here to chase short-term engagement, even if it means playing with fire?
We don’t have to agree with every critique. But if your first instinct is to mock or minimize those who raise it, especially when they’re drawing on behavioral science and basic pattern recognition, then you’re not being strategic.
You’re being defensive.
And it shows.
Sian Conway-Wood is a leading brand, marketing, and communications strategist, renowned for her expertise in sustainability and behavioural science. As senior managing partner at 181st Street Communications, she specializes in taking challenger product brands mainstream. Recognized as a UK government green ambassador, Sian works closely with DEFRA to advocate for climate and nature causes, pushing the sustainability agenda at both grassroots and governmental levels.
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