“What brand am I wearing?” Sydney Sweeney says, looking into the camera as the shutter snaps, revealing a rotation of summery denim looks. The mood suddenly calms, her eyes close, she takes a deep breath, seagulls call in the background. “Yeah, that one,” she says with a giggle.
The ad marks the return of one of the most notorious brand partnerships in recent memory, as American Eagle launches a new campaign to hype its denim shorts called “Syd for Short.” It’s a perfectly pleasant, perfectly innocuous piece of brand work meant to conjure the free-spiritedness of summertime (and, you know, maybe make you forget about—or at least move on from—the last time Sweeney hawked jeans for the retailer).
When I saw the new work, I knew I needed to talk to American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers about it. Brommers steered the brand through last year’s drama, when the internet turned Sweeney’s “Great Jeans” spot into a cultural lightning rod. He tells me the new campaign has two primary goals: First, and unsurprisingly, it wants to start a new chapter in the brand’s Sweeney partnership. Second, it wants to offer the Gen Z audience a break from all the noise that’s aimed its way.
“The world is pretty noisy right now. Social media creates noise, geopolitical issues create noise, and Gen Z talks about their mental health challenges and how that’s creating noise for them,” Brommers says. Conversely, he says, the ad is about “turning down the external noise, embracing who you really are, and then being able to live your life, especially in this season—summer—that Gen Z looks forward to the most all year.”
The mellow vibe provides an intentional contrast to last year’s campaign. Where “Great Jeans” saw Sweeney tapping into a more straight-faced, sultry version of herself, here Syd is all easy smiles and playful laughs. American Eagle knows as well as anyone that ads can create noise, too, and it’s using this moment to take a quieter approach.
As far as I know, there’s no marketing manual for how to follow up an advertising campaign that much of the internet interpreted as eugenics propaganda dressed up like a pervy old Calvin Klein commercial. Do you lean into provocation? Do you play it safe? Do you ditch your tainted celeb spokesperson altogether?
With “Syd for Short,” American Eagle is betting on something it believes will pay off in the long run: brand consistency.
Brand noise
The waves of headlines labeling last year’s American Eagle ad racist dog whistling, combined with the counter waves declaring that reaction “woke” nonsense, caught the brand itself in the middle of that noise. Noise, mind you, that boosted the company’s customer base by 700,000, helped its 2025 Q3 revenue jump by 1% after two previously slumping quarters, and has since attracted 56 billion impressions, according to Brommers.
But in the midst of that storm around the brand, there were decisions to be made. Just a month after the Sweeney jeans/genes spot dropped, Cracker Barrel unveiled a new logo that was quickly and enthusiastically panned by many of its customers before eventually being scrapped.
Marketers are largely known to have the rigidity of a used car lot tube man when it comes to swaying to public opinion. But Brommers was confronted with a major divide between the negative hot-take hype and the positive signs he was seeing in the brand’s actual data. And the latter informed the decision to stick with the work.
“The data that we looked at during the initial campaign—across genders, geography, ethnicities, generations—for the vast majority of every subset of every demographic, it wasn’t even close,” Brommers says. “When you have, at least from my perspective, such a clear-cut case, and you’re seeing really positive response from the business, that’s a case for consistency. It is a case for moving forward.”
Perhaps counterintuitively, people appear to respect a brand for sticking with a stance, regardless of whether they agree with it. Recent Ipsos Consumer Tracker data shows that 57% of American consumers believe if a brand takes a political stance, it should stick by that decision, regardless of consumer backlash. Brommers believes the same can be said for controversial partnerships.
Sydney vs. Syd
Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner has said that the show is ultimately about our complicated relationship with advertising, and that advertising doesn’t create want; it merely reflects the want we already have. I’d argue you could say the same for culture, in that advertising doesn’t create it, but reflects where it’s at in any given moment.
And for all the attention the original Sweeney campaign got from people at either end of the political spectrum, it appears the most significant impact was felt from everyone in between—those who scrolled these takes and became the “FFS, it’s just jeans” demographic.
Still, by its very tone, the new Syd campaign is a move by the brand to dial down the volume, not only to give Gen Z’s ears a break but also its own brand image.
“The best brand campaigns do identify an emotional truth, and there is an emotional truth through line to what Sydney and American Eagle experienced together last fall, and what Gen Z tells us they’re experiencing right now,” Brommers says. “It’s a new chapter in the most successful brand campaign in the history of American Eagle, but there is a constant demand to keep it fresh and keep the story moving forward. That’s why neither Sydney or American Eagle necessarily wanted to just rehash what we had done. It was important for us to be together, and it was very important to our customer that Sydney remained in the storyline.”
The shift in the work is also reflected in the differences between Sydney and Syd. Sure, there’s the wink-wink “Syd for Short” to sell actual shorts, but it’s also a step away from the celebrity of the previous campaign to something simpler.
“When you think about Sydney Sweeney, the public thinks about the person they see on the red carpet, in box-office hits, in Emmy-winning shows. But there’s also Syd,” Brommers says. “Syd is real, she’s casual, she’s confident. And Syd is someone our customer really relates to.”
American Eagle stock closed out the week up nearly 9% since the new work launched on April 15. It’s a fine line to walk for the brand to maintain its consistency here, fully owning the last campaign while very clearly trying to move on without coming up short.