Watch the video above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
I’m not telling you that this is Sticky Sales Stories. And I’m not telling you that’s Stephen Semple, and I’m Matthew Burns. I am not telling you that you should watch to learn a whole bunch of really awesome things about advertising and marketing and learn some stuff. I’m also not telling you that Stephen Semple wrote a book, Five Silver Bullets.

Stephen Semple:
All I’m going to say is you’re not Sydney Sweeney.

Matthew Burns: I’m definitely not Sydney Sweeney.

 

Sydney Sweeney:
I’m not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans, and I definitely won’t say that they’re the most comfortable jeans I’ve ever worn, or that they make your butt look amazing. Why would I need to do that? But if you said that you want to buy the jeans, I’m not going to stop you. But just so we’re clear, this is not me telling you to buy American Eagle jeans.

Announcer:
Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.

Sydney Sweeney:
You see what I did there? Right?

Matthew Burns:
Stephen brought this to my attention and as he does, he found out data first and then went, oh my God. And then he watched the ads. He said, Matt, what do you think of the ads. So I did my research regardless of my feelings of the campaign, it got a lot of heat.

Stephen Semple:
Yes, a lot of haters.

Matthew Burns:
Okay, so talk to me.

Stephen Semple:
A lot of haters. Hey, look, we talk to clients about this all the time. You can often create campaigns that have some real emotional content in them that create a lot of hate. But here’s a question. Was it successful? So the Sweeney Kelce campaign combined generated a staggering 40 billion impressions on social media.

Matthew Burns:
So it garnered attention.

Stephen Semple:
According to American Eagle, to quote them, the Chief Marketing Officer Craig Brommers, said on an earnings call, Sweeney is a winner. And in just six weeks, the campaign has generated unprecedented new customer acquisition on that same earnings call. They want on to say that the Sweeney jeans sold out within weeks and some items sold out in a day.

Matthew Burns:
Blistering fast sales with no sale item.

Stephen Semple:
Right. So on one hand you could sit there and go, it got a lot of flack, a lot of hate. But was it a successful campaign? It sold a lot of stuff. So if the objective is I want to sell a whole crap ton of jeans, it was successful.

Matthew Burns:
Listen, I would even argue that what they did was they chose who to lose. And we’ve talked about this with our clients, we talk about this all the time, actually choosing who to lose. So they chose to lose, which is this one side of the demographic that they don’t care about. And then they went, but those people that can identify with this message we’re totally good with. And apparently it was a lot of them.

Stephen Semple:
Yes. Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
Right. So I love that. When we were talking off camera, you had talked about the fact that this was address and dismiss.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Which is interesting because the last time we did one address and dismiss, it was old Cadillac ad that Kate Walsh did.

Matthew Burns:
And I’m just saying two beautiful women and address and dismiss. I think there’s — women, you have some power out there. I’m just saying. Let’s break this down. Is there an argument that this is not a good campaign? I’m going to play another one in a second.

Stephen Semple:
Look, anytime you can make the argument that you can say it’s not a great campaign because we created a lot of negative press and there are going to be people who are going to boycott American Eagle and stand against American Eagle, you can make that argument. Here’s my problem with that argument, and here’s what we’ve noticed with our own customers. Great campaigns are highly emotional. And anytime you put an emotional campaign out there, you get two things. You get lovers and you get haters. The haters tend to be the most loud. The lovers walk into the store and make purchases.

Now, if the hate group is way bigger than the love group or you alienated really important customer group, like we talked about in Tesla, where there’s a problem going on where Tesla, right, it would be a fail. But I have a hard time looking at this campaign, especially when you look at traditionally the types of things American Eagle has advertised and how they’ve done it.

I have a hard time imagining that this is nothing but a brilliant campaign for American Eagle. Even if you hate it. I’m just looking at American Eagle as a brand, what American Eagle has stood for in the past, how American Eagle has advertised in the past and the results from this. I actually think you’ve got to look at this as being successful.

Matthew Burns:
So then if it’s successful, yes, there are people that can argue that it’s not. But we as marketers, we as advertisers can honestly say that we don’t think that this is a fail. We look at this as a win. So as a win, what did they do to make it a win?

Stephen Semple:
So first of all, when the complaints came out, the other thing that happens when the complaints came out, they didn’t. Didn’t fudge, they didn’t flinch. They kept running it.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right. And they doubled down. They made more.

Stephen Semple:
They made more kept running it. They made more. They didn’t flinch because the love takes a little longer than they hate. The hate is instantaneous. The love takes a little bit longer. And again, we’ve seen this, some of our most successful campaigns, even ones where we get people coming in going, oh, I love that. I love that. Yeah, they get hate mail too. They get love notes too. You get both.

We think about love and hate as being opposite emotions and they are not. They’re opposite sides of the same coin. The opposite of love is apathy. The opposite of hate is apathy. When we care about something deeply, when we care about something deeply, we either love it or we hate it.

Matthew Burns:
Well, and I love — Mick Torbay has done this and we all have a version of it, but we have the exact same metaphysical reaction to love and hate. We get nervous. We have the shakes, our skin changes color. All those things happen either side of the coin. But when we don’t feel anything, this is what you get.

Stephen Semple:
And I have to give American Eagle kudos here in today’s world. Today’s world, the automatic reaction is the moment that that hate mail happens is they run. And they kept at it. They leaned into it, they kept at it. And if I was them, I’d be continuing to run this campaign.

Matthew Burns:
Okay, perfect. So it was big time successful because they didn’t follow the leader in, okay, oh, we’re going to change it. Okay, sorry, we didn’t mean to piss people off. They’re like, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy the jeans. Don’t worry about it.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
So that’s awesome. The second thing that I like is that they leaned into address and dismiss, but they didn’t lean into a campaign of address and dismiss. You know what, lemme play an ad now I’m going to talk about both of them. So then watch this one. And this one’s a shorter, more concise ad. Okay, watch this.

 

Sydney Sweeney:
Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.

Announcer:
Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.

Stephen Semple:
I love the little switch. My jeans are blue.

Matthew Burns:
My jeans are blue, which I mean blue jeans is a coined term.

Stephen Semple:
And the blue eyes. And she talks about how genes lead to eye color. Look, it’s got some cleverness in there as well. And as we also know from research ads that are clever and all those things are also very, very powerful.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. So the first one, they took the whole idea of address and dismiss. I’m bringing it up, but I’m taking it away. I’m bringing it up. It’s really not important. I’m bringing it up and this is not what I’m doing now. She was cheeky at the end of it. And the way I was cheeky at the beginning of the episode was like, did you see what I did there?

Stephen Semple:
To me, my least favorite part of that is to see what I did there.

Matthew Burns:
I know, because…

Stephen Semple:
I actually think if somebody goes back and watches the Kate Walsh one, it was done way — their closing line was way better. Then they flipped it to instead of, do you see what I did there? They flipped it to the question.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
Not what it was like. You would think it’s about this. You think it’s about this. You think it was about this. But the real question is, when you turn on your car, does it return the favor? Then that’s way better than the did you see what I did there? Because that — it’s kind of like in case you’re too dumb, I’m going to point it out to you. Right. It really lost a little bit of the magic with that.

Matthew Burns:
Listen, I agree wholeheartedly. And then the second one, the power of it was actually very glamorous, even though you wouldn’t think it was glamorous, but it used frameline magnetism to a tee and she was looking away for most of it. You didn’t see her eyes, you didn’t see her face. She eventually, she does up her jeans and then right at the end she goes, and my jeans are blue. Which is that statement. It’s that powerhouse statement right at the end. And it’s the thing that you weren’t expecting her to say.

Stephen Semple:
And there was a reason for her to turn because you now need to view her eyes in that moment.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly right. So it was a glamor play as opposed to address and dismiss, which I love. I don’t know the ad agency, I’m sure you found it out or you will figure it out. But the ad agency themselves, guys, congratulations. Way to use really awesome and amazingly copyable and usable tropes that work every single time. These are concepts that will always work If you use them properly, you mean you really have to work at it. You got to do your work. So great job for you guys. And I loved all that.

And listen, there wasn’t just two. My favorite part was — how we know that this was successful –and for me, yes, the sales and all that’s great. But pop culture takes over when something is a powerful message. And so now whether you like the idea of it or not, it got parodied almost immediately. It immediately got parody, which means the message was strong. And so I am debating, I’ll see if I put a link to the other one. I’m not going to show it here because it might be a bit off color for some, but it got parody. We know that when Apple 1984 played one ad one time, they made a Lego set about it.

Okay. The 1984 ad. So we know messages are powerful when other people steal it and use it and manipulate it and make it theirs. So I’m going to say full out win for American Eagle. Like guys, kudos, hats off. Whether or not you care for sex selling jeans or not, too bad sex has been selling things for a long time. It’s going to be the way it is. We just talked about Kate Walsh doing it in 1985. Sydney Sweeney’s doing it now. In 10 years there’s going to be some new icon that’s going to do it, but they used real advertising standards and fundamentals and that’s what makes me happy. They didn’t try to make up something new, they didn’t dumb down to the center. They reached out to the very tippy toe edge of what was going to be awesome and lived there. And at the edge is where we move people.

Stephen Semple:
So here’s what Brommers, the Chief Marketing Officer with American Eagle had to say–

Matthew Burns:
You found it good.

Stephen Semple:
“Sydney Sweeney has great genes and is not going anywhere.”

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, enough said, enough said. Hey Steve, you’re the man. I appreciate you. We’ll talk to everybody soon.

Stephen Semple:
Alright, thanks Matt.

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