Sydney Sweeney’s genes.
July 31, 2025
By Gonzalo López Martí
Creative Director
Fashion marketers are accomplished baiters (apologies for broaching the obvious).
Calvin Klein was playing the bait card when social media was barely a figment in the imagination of science fiction writers.
Needless to say, mainstream Madison Avenue creatives such as yours truly have tried to get our clients to borrow a page from the garment industry baitbook for years.
With very limited success.
It is extremely hard to get a big corporate brand to pursue this tactic.
Too risky.
If the baity campaign garners visibility, buzz and engagement, EVERYONE takes credit.
From the CEO to the janitor, both on the client and the agency side.
On the other hand, if the controversy gets out of hand, it’s the CMOs head in a basket.*
Career ostracism.
Cancellation.
When you are a Fortune 500 CMO, too many people want to see your skull roll.
There’s a long line of backstabbers waiting for the faux pas that will have you vacate your cushy corner office.
Scandals are good to cull the org chart and make room at the rarefied atmosphere of the upper echelons.
For the good or the bad, traditional global marketers -and the agencies who cater to them- will never learn to navigate, let alone profit from, the controversy game.
It’s a no-go zone.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
It’s baked in.
It’s a corporate thang.
Big bureaucracies just operate this way.
This aversion to make waves might’ve played a big part in Madison avenue’s current state of demoralization and decadence.
Silicon Valley stole our thunder and our media dollars, among other things, because their stomach lining is way better at handling risk.
They just know how to hype.
They know that this too shall pass.
See, it ain’t brain surgery the bait game.
Put something contentious out there.
Ipso facto, the mobile phone leisure class will hyperventilate from the warmth of their toilet seats.
Racism! Wokism! Patriarchy! Somethingphobia!
Engagement will ensue and, more often than not, inventories will move.
The latest storm in a teapot unfolded over an American Eagle campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney under the claim “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” (wink wink nudge nudge).
Eugenics! White supremacy!
My interpretation is different: the campaign is being ironic.
Sydney Sweeney does not have great genes.
She is not particularly tall or classically beautiful.
She’s a bottle blonde who wears a ton of makeup to offset her saggy cheeks and bulgy eyes.
Her waist to hip ratio is not quite proportioned.
She seems to have the build of a chubby person who lost weight.**
She does have a nice pair of ¿natural? breasts, which she shamelessly and masterfully exploits.
What she does have in spades is: aura
Industrial amounts of it.
The camera loves her and she loves it back.
The it factor.
The je ne sais quoi.
That, ladies and gents, is what sells movie tickets.
And clothing.
That’s what separates catalog models from movie stars.
Ms. Sweeney’s talent is precisely the fact that, despite being far from perfect, she projects supreme self-confidence.
Behold one of the few saving graces in showbusiness: the genetic lottery is not really what matters.
Kate Moss had an odd androgynous beauty.
Anya Taylor-Joy is not pretty in a classical way, yet she oozes personality.
Sydney Sweeney is the average girl that could.
*Google Alissa Heinerscheid. Hint: she was Bud Light’s president of marketing during the Dylan Mulvaney’s meltdown.
**Speaking of jeans and girth, remember Subway’s Jared Fogle? He became famous showing the oversize pants he wore when he was morbidly obese. His claim to fame and fortune: he had allegedly lost weight by eating Subway’s allegedly healthy subs. Featuring him on its ad campaigns was a massive hit for said QSR brand. Until a massive scandal emerged: the FBI identified Fogle as a consumer of online child pornography. Needless to say, heads rolled in Subway’s marketing department, agencies were fired and sales tanked. I used to work with the Subway account before the meltdown: the client had tried several times to feature Mr. Fogle on campaigns targeting US Hispanic audiences, but, for some reason, he never resonated with latinos.
