American Eagle’s CMO on Why Doing ‘Nothing’ Was the Boldest Move

More than two months after American Eagle’s campaign starring actress Sydney Sweeney ignited a national debate after some perceived it as a eugenics reference, chief marketing officer (CMO) Craig Brommers is still navigating the news cycle.

“Just this last Saturday night, this was still in the news. This was on SNL,” he said on stage at ADWEEK House: Advertising HQ on Thursday. “I can’t believe that anything in our advertising marketing world is still commanding this amount of attention 10 weeks later.”

In a candid conversation with ADWEEK’s chief brand and community Officer Jenny Rooney, Brommers shared for the first time in front of a public audience how he navigated the weeks of debate and discourse sparked by the campaign—and why his approach veered from the typical brand crisis playbook.

“The goal really was not to participate in culture, but to define culture,” Brommers said of the campaign. “This has exceeded those wildest dreams.”

Stock surge to backlash

When the campaign launched on a Friday in late June, the initial response was overwhelmingly positive. American Eagle’s stock shot up 25% on the day of the launch, which was announced with widespread coverage across financial, entertainment, retail, and marketing press.

By the weekend, the tone had shifted.

“I vividly remember sitting down, having a cup of coffee, and opening LinkedIn and reading really nasty comments for the first time,” Brommers recalled. “It just stopped me. I was like, ‘whoa, where is this coming from?’”

Negative sentiment peaked the following Monday, which Brommers emphasized was the only day during the campaign’s 10-week run when criticism outweighed support.

“Some people say this campaign was swamped by negativity. It is absolutely not true,” he said.

But as the narrative began to shift, Brommers quickly assembled a small team of internal and external partners to come up with a strategy centered on restraint. “On one hand, we had to do something very quickly, and on the other hand, we did nothing,” he said.

Instead of reacting to the noise online, the brand needed to “get a read from real Americans,” Brommers said. What they saw “gave us a lot of confidence” to stay the course.

“You have a crisis communications industrial complex that is telling you to do this playbook that has been around for decades,” he said. “We actually did the opposite. We actually did nothing, and just read the room for a moment.”

While CMOs in Brommers’ shoes may have feared losing their jobs over such a ruckus, Brommers said he had “1,000% support” from the CEO and the board.

“Five years ago, the playbook could have been: CMO gets fired. The campaign immediately gets taken down. Someone writes a big check to the ACLU,” he said. “I knew that I didn’t have to worry about that.”

He also noted the brand’s relationship with Sweeney throughout the controversy helped both weather the storm. “She stuck with us, and you better be damn sure that we will stick with her,” he said. “There were some hairy moments in that, and both of us stood by each other.”

Quiet time

Because American Eagle is publicly traded, the company was in a “quiet period” for more than two months following the campaign’s launch, meaning it couldn’t share results or respond to criticism until weeks after the fact.

For Brommers, that—in light of what he viewed as “unrelenting negative coverage by so-called crisis communications experts,”—was frustrating. “It pissed me off, because no one took the chance to say, ‘What if this is working?’” he said.

Eventually, the company was able to reveal that the campaign drove one million new customers to American Eagle within six weeks. Brommers spoke about the campaign’s impact on the business on American Eagle’s Q2 earnings call on Sept. 1.

“There is a very rare instance when a chief marketing officer is asked to participate in his or her publicly traded company’s earnings call,” he said. “I have had that privilege.”

When asked what he would have done differently, Brommers was clear: “I would have bought more jeans inventory. Some of these things sold out so quickly.”

For other marketers navigating similar high-stakes moments, his advice: listen to your customers.

“Social media is very noisy. It’s not reality,” he said. “Understand what your customers are saying, and cement that CEO-CMO relationship before something like this happens.”

“Ultimately, people will remember it for Sweeney and great jeans–which, again, was the original intent,” he added.