Controversy over American Eagle’s new Sydney Sweeney campaign is dominating headlines, but social media posts about the campaign have been mostly positive, according to data provided exclusively to Retail Brew from PeakMetrics.
From the launch of the campaign on July 23 through August 1, 63.7% of posts that mentioned American Eagle across TikTok and X combined were favorable, while 29.4% were unfavorable and 6.9% were neutral.
Molly Dwyer, director of insights at PeakMetrics, told Retail Brew that she found the results “slightly surprising,” but not inexplicable, considering the way the campaign has found more voluble defendants on the right than critics elsewhere.
Critics of the campaign, “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” objected to the double-meaning of the actor having great genes in the genetic sense, with some seeing eugenic undertones.
As recently as July 28, favorable and unfavorable mentions about American Eagle on the platforms were “roughly even,” Dwyer said, adding that shifted when “the right-wing media ecosystem got a hold of this.”
The New York Post dismissed critics of the campaign as a “crazed woke mob,” a sentiment echoed in numerous segments on Fox News. Then conservative politicians, including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Senator Ted Cruz, spoke out in defense of American Eagle, but no comparable cadre of high-profile Democrats raised objections to the campaign.
“Basically the favorable [to the campaign] side kept up the volume,” Dwyer said. “They kept their foot on the gas, drawing this into the Fox News discourse, drawing this into the White House discourse, and there is nobody on the anti-American Eagle side” who is as impactfully “keeping this conversation going.”
In other words, the backlash was trumped (and Trumped) by the backlash to the backlash.
“The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point,” Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic about the online reaction to the campaign. “Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch.”
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American Eagle did not respond to a request for comment.
High flyer: Retail Brew asked PeakMetrics to compare mentions on X (irrespective of sentiment) of both American Eagle and a rival for Gen Z and millennial consumers, Abercrombie & Fitch, for the year to date.
Since January, daily mentions of Abercrombie mostly modulated between 25,000 and 75,000, with American Eagle well below that, but with the campaign, American Eagle has soared much higher than Abercrombie, reaching more than 170,000 mentions.
A recent analysis provided exclusively for Retail Brew from Maps, an analytics firm tracking corporate reputation, aggregated the sentiment of mentions of American Eagle from both mainstream media outlets and social media.
With news outlets in the mix, negative mentions far outweigh positive ones, but the positive mentions after the campaign began still dwarf total mentions of the brand before the campaign started.
Overall, before the campaign American Eagle averaged 67 daily mentions in media outlets and on social media, but since the campaign broke, that average has escalated to 33,000 mentions, per Maps.
Google Trends tells a similar story. Since 2004, which is as far back as Google Trends goes, Google searches for “American Eagle” reached an all-time high after the campaign launched.
Jean splicing: But what do all the numbers mean for American Eagle’s bottom line? Plenty of the American Eagle coverage is negative, and the notion that all publicity is good publicity—paging Bud Light—doesn’t really hold up in the social media era.
Still, PeakMetrics’s Dwyer predicts it’s “going to be good for American Eagle” because the brand has struck a chord with conservatives.
“The data volume that we’re looking at shows more people in defense of” American Eagle, Dwyer said. “And I think that they’ve successfully coded themselves now as a wink-wink nudge-nudge right-wing brand.”