The left is trying its best to stir up a furor over the recent Sydney Sweeney jeans (or is it genes) TV commercial to ignite a backlash similar to the Dylan Mulvaney-Bud Light debacle.
Sorry progressives, it ain’t happening.
Yes, there’s lots of chirping from lefty columnists, purple-haired TikTok influencers, late-night hosts who are still employed, and assorted wokesters after American Eagle had the audacity to feature the attractive blond, blue-eyed actress expressing her sartorial flair in a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color . . . my jeans are blue,” the “Euphoria” star says.
The ad ends with a voice-over: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
Blond women? Blue-eyed? Good genes (I mean jeans)? Oh, the horror! That’s if you are listening to the leftist commentariat that still hasn’t piped down weeks after the spot first appeared. The lefties are freaking because they think the jeans company is looking to bring back the bad old days, pre-George Floyd of course, when white blond oppressors ruled over American culture.
It’s all very Hitler-like to the progressive numbskull class, but not to just about every other segment of American society. Most Americans of all colors and genders either don’t care, or they know good genes and jeans when they see it.
I know this based on lots of reporting on the mind virus known wokeness — the progressive orthodoxy that embraces everything from cultural Marxism, DEI and, of course, the oppressor-oppressed theology.
We are a diverse country, and that’s good. The wokesters take it to a level that excludes rather than includes. Good-looking white people, particularly if their hair is that evil shade known as blond, are nowhere near the intersectional matrix they demand for hiring or image making in their version of America.
That’s why Sydney Sweeney, known more for her cleavage than her politics, has become a touchstone in our culture wars, and here’s why the attacks won’t work: Wokeness was once big in the business world, but notice my use of the past tense.
Corporate America listened to these kooks for many reasons, including their own progressive management leanings, with disastrous results. They learned the hard way that most Americans of all races hate being proselytized with political dogma, particularly of the left-wing variety that pushes the limits of identity and gender politics beyond cultural norms.
I chronicled this spectacle with a healthy dose of schadenfreude in my book “Go Woke Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America.” Just a few short years ago, DEI was the norm; so was radical environmentalism pushed by asset managers through something called ESG investing. It was difficult finding a straight man or woman — God forbid a blond — who survived the Madison Avenue woke censor machine.
Budweiser thought its customers were ready for a commercial featuring a half-naked trans woman in a bubble bath. Disney decided it could sell more kids programming featuring same-sex kissing scenes. Money managers like BlackRock thought they could increase returns by advocating environmentalism and de facto racial quotas on their portfolio companies.
All of the above resulted in some of the biggest brand-destroying disasters in modern business history.
Marketing is a lot like politics. It’s a business of addition, not subtraction. You build customers just like you attract voters, through messaging that unites rather than divides — or customers flee. There are exceptions, of course. Niche brands like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream attempt and succeed at targeting the tree-hugger demo.
Try this stuff on a mass audience and you will get the beatdown of the century. The predictable customer revolt impacted the businesses of Budweiser, Disney and BlackRock in such a measurable way that shareholders revolted, too, forcing some of the most progressive CEOs in the world to course-correct.
That’s why the Sydney Sweeney uproar will go nowhere with the people who matter most: Most American consumers, and American Eagle shareholders. Unless you’re stretching it like Silly Putty, there’s nothing inherently political about a pretty blond (dare I say “All American”-looking) woman in jeans and pointing out the health of her genes to sell stuff. Zero. Zilch. Otherwise, Pamela Anderson would have been a poster child for Aryan Nations instead of the “Baywatch” babe most American men and many women adored, and still do.
Shares of American Eagle are up since the Sydney Sweeney ad ran, despite the backlash. NYU Marketing Professor Eitan Muller points out the obvious, telling Fox Business’s Teuta Dedvukaj that the commercial “attracts attention, drives Google searches, and boosts the brand. Yes, she does have great genes — and it rings authentic. That’s what you want from an ad.”
My bet: You will be seeing a lot more of Sydney Sweeney. Most men will be rejoicing, many women will buy the company’s jeans. Management will be rewarded with higher sales and a stock price that matches. The attacks will ultimately fail for the same reason Mulvaney’s tenure as a spokeswoman for Bud Light was so short-lived. Recall: The nation’s Number 1-selling beer dropped to Number 3 and never recovered.
Sydney Sweeney has both good jeans and genes and there’s nothing the wokesters can do to change that reality.
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