Veteran marketer defends controversial Sydney Sweeney jeans ad campaign: The publicity was 'worth billions'

Veteran marketer Mark Penn has no regrets about signing off on the viral Sydney Sweeney American Eagle Outfitters ( AEO ) jeans ad.

"A campaign like that was worth billions of dollars, and so people don't understand … the power of marketing," the Stagwell ( STGW ) founder and CEO said in a new episode of the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast (video above; listen in below).

Penn's firm worked with American Eagle to develop the ad.

Over the course of four decades, Penn has served as a pollster for Bill Clinton, the CEO of PR outfit Burson-Marsteller, and the chief strategy officer at Microsoft ( MSFT ). He founded Stagwell in 2015, and the company now sports a market capitalization of more than $2 billion.

"I always find that Americans and American companies … view marketing as evil," Penn added. "They basically think their products should sell without marketing because they're so good and people should just come and buy them. But the truth of the matter is, you have to make your products attractive. You have to underscore the real features of them, and then you need to do it with some element of interest or panache or something that really strikes a chord. And when that happens, wow."

American Eagle's 2025 campaign starring Sydney Sweeney was built around the "Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans" tagline. It sparked a fierce online backlash over its deliberate play on "jeans" and "genes."

Critics argued that the ads' references to inherited traits, combined with Sweeney's blonde hair and blue eyes, evoked ideas associated with eugenics and racial superiority

Others viewed the campaign simply as provocative wordplay and a throwback to classic denim advertising.

American Eagle defended the campaign, saying it "is and always was about the jeans" and emphasizing that its products are meant to be worn with confidence by everyone.

The campaign generated substantial attention for the brand. American Eagle went on to disclose more than 40 billion impressions and more than 700,000 new customers across its Sweeney and related campaigns.

"So there was no question in the research that came back — and I did a nice event with the CMO — that sometimes you have to understand when to kind of run in a different direction than everybody's telling you. And this was one of those cases," Penn said.

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor, host of the Sozzi Unleashed morning show and the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast, and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi , Instagram , and LinkedIn . Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.