The real lesson of the Sydney Sweeney fuss isn’t about denim, says the CMO. It’s about risk.
Craig Brommers
When Craig Brommers, the CMO of American Eagle and one of The Drum’s Rebel 50 (created in partnership with WeTransfer Advertising), signed off on the now-famous line ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,’ the industry scoffed. Analysts briefed against it. Some peers dismissed it as a gimmick. One commentator even suggested it smacked of “eugenics.” Then Donald Trump piled in, amplifying the row into a national talking point.
For many marketers, being at the center of an unprecedented social media firestorm would have felt like disaster. Brommers insists he saw it differently. “I was at the epicentre of what looked like a crisis,” he recalls. “But we never saw it as a crisis. We saw it as an opportunity. The consumer was talking about us. Our job was to channel that conversation back to the jeans.”
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The backlash was real. The trade press was lukewarm. Consultants warned of reputational damage. The Drum itself received a pre-results report analysing why the campaign was a failure. Yet while the industry wrung its hands, American Eagle’s board backed its CMO. That support, Brommers says, was crucial: “I’ve got a board and an executive team who let me jump off the cliff. That’s crucial. If you’re going to take risks, you need to know your company will support you.”
The results justified the leap. The campaign generated more than 40bn impressions, sold out The Sydney Jean almost instantly and brought in over a million new customers. American Eagle’s stock surged 38% in a single day – the biggest in the company’s history. The success was so stark that Brommers himself was invited on to the quarterly earnings call – a rare spotlight for a marketer. “That doesn’t happen often,” he says, “but it was a reminder that marketing isn’t a side hustle. When it works, it’s fundamental.”
Brommers’s appetite for risk didn’t come from nowhere. Before joining American Eagle in 2020, he cut his teeth at Speedo, where he helped steer campaigns that blurred the line between culture and commerce, and later at Gap and Calvin Klein. That background gave him both a respect for the heritage of denim and a taste for pushing categories forward. “I’ve been lucky enough to work with brands where the expectation is to lead, not follow,” he says. “That gives you confidence to take risks others might shy away from.”
Even before Sydney Sweeney fronted the campaign, culture had already shifted. Kendrick Lamar appeared in dramatic flares from another brand, sparking a sudden spike in searches. AE moved quickly to lean into the flare trend, positioning itself at the center of the conversation. For Brommers, the moment reinforced a bigger philosophy: culture won’t wait. “If you’re waiting for the research deck to tell you it’s safe, it’s already too late,” he says.
The storm around Sweeney forced another kind of decision. Do you fight every fire online or hold back? Brommers is clear about his approach. “My advice: don’t post immediately. Let the noise settle. And if you do post, do one post and stick to it.” That post was an Instagram statement that read: “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”
The clarity worked. The outrage burned out. The sales lit up.
Brommers doesn’t mince his words when it comes to the wider industry. Too many campaigns, he argues, are “vanilla,” designed to win applause in conference rooms or rack up likes on LinkedIn rather than spark real consumer conversation. He believes marketing has drifted into risk management at the expense of creativity. “We’ve become so focused on being safe that we forget the whole point of this job is to surprise people,” he says. “Gen Z doesn’t want safe. They want bold, cheeky, surprising. And if that makes some people uncomfortable, that’s probably a good sign you’re on to something.”
Brommers doesn’t think of campaigns as one-offs. He frames them like seasons of a streaming series. There are guests, cliffhangers, twists – and at the heart of it, always surprise. Sweeney was season one. Season two followed with NFL star Travis Kelce’s Tru Kolors collab, which, in a stroke of cultural timing, landed just as Kelce and Taylor Swift announced their engagement. AE was once again at the heart of the cultural conversation.
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So, what does it take to be a rebel marketer? “You’ve got to be curious,” Brommers says. “It keeps you looking at culture sideways instead of straight on. You’ve got to be emotional. If you don’t feel something yourself, how do you expect anyone else to? And you’ve got to be confident: confident enough to push the button when everyone else is telling you not to.”
How do you follow the most iconic jeans campaign of Gen Z’s lifetime? Brommers doesn’t hesitate. “I work for an amazing company who are totally prepared to let me jump off the cliff again,” he says. “And I intend to.”
Craig Brommers didn’t just sell jeans. He turned crisis into opportunity, proved that risk pays and showed that listening to consumers beats listening to conference rooms. In an industry that has become more risk-averse than ever, his inclusion in The Drum’s Rebel 50 is a sharp reminder: the bold still win.
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