The Sydney Sweeney Ad Is Working Exactly As Designed

I Watched a Fifteen-Minute Meeting Run an Hour Because of a Jeans Commercial, and I’ve Been Thinking About It for a Year

Let me put you in the room. Why? Because that’s how I roll, you MOFO.

It’s a conference room that feels like a Cold War bunker, by way of Stalin and approved by North Korean decorators. Windowless. Concrete. A table, a whiteboard, one recessed light, and the specific institutional smell of a place where nothing personal has ever been allowed. Where doom and gloom become bedfellows and someone takes joy to a brick wall and hands it a cigar and a blindfold. This is a big tech client — one of those clients — and everyone at the table has an MBA, an NDA, and the posture of someone who knows they have the biggest dick in the room.

Confidentiality here isn’t a policy, it’s a religion enforced by lawyers and folks that make the Gestapo seem positively cheery. The vibe is that if you break the NDA you do not get sued, you simply stop being. Period.

And the meetings are chronographed. I mean that. If they tell you fifteen minutes, then at fourteen minutes and change, the laptop closes, the hand comes out, and you are being walked to the elevator mid-thought. I have never once seen that room run sixteen minutes. It was the most reliable thing in my professional life. It was like when in The Crown the queen punched a stopwatch on Winston Churchill.

We’re maybe seven minutes into discussing their new tech stack when one of them — a guy about ten years my senior, gray at the temples, the most serious person in a room full of serious people — leans back and says:

“Have you seen the new American Eagle commercial?”

And he starts talking about Sydney Sweeney.

Now. I want to be up front about my own standing here, because it’s relevant. I had no idea who Sydney Sweeney was. None. Hadn’t seen Euphoria, hadn’t seen The White Lotus. I’m a huge TV guy — I also read dead Russians about biological weapons and then can’t sleep. I watched Doctor Who. I watched The Walking Dead. I watch HBO dramas. But Sydney flew right through my radar. When he said the name, my brain — doing its absolute best with no data — offered me two options: a candy, or a sequel to Sweeney Todd.

The meeting ran an hour.

An hour. In the chronograph room. Nobody looked at a laptop. The tech stack was never mentioned again. Pictures were pulled out and the projector was hijacked to show Sydney.

STOP.

Full turn signal, because we’re going to leave that bunker, stop at a second meeting two weeks later, and end up in a fight between Olympians and a prediction market. I’d rather you saw it coming.

The Second Meeting, Which Is the One That Actually Matters

Two weeks on. Different room, different project. We’re deep in a horror script, and specifically we’re looking at an algorithm that scores a project’s likely profitability. Yes, those exist, and boy are they right.

And one of the things that algorithm weighs is who you put in the two lead roles.

Not “are they attractive.” That’s naïve, blaisé — you don’t even warrant a standing in that room with that read, you dullard. Here’s a stick, go play with it. I want to lay out the real version carefully because it is the single most interesting thing anybody told me all year.

Horror movies that actually make money — not open big, make money, the ones that stop being a film and turn into a franchise, your Conjurings, your Backrooms and so forth — are, underneath all the demons and the crucifixes and the thing in the wardrobe, safe for couples and safe for older audiences. That’s the one magic-bullet quality. Not the scares. The scares are the delivery mechanism, used since time immemorial. The thing being delivered is ninety minutes two people can sit through together and then talk about in the car, and that you can also watch with your mother without either of you developing a new problem.

Not the lesbian scene from Mulholland Drive. I watched it with my mom, because “Mom, it’s David Lynch’s new flick.” I was 19 at the time. It should come with a freaking disclaimer.

And casting is where that gets won or lost.

What the model found — and this is the part that rearranged the noggin furniture in the brain pan — is that nobody in a couple wants to feel threatened by the face on the screen.

Women do not want to sit in the dark next to their partner watching an overwhelmingly sexy female lead. And men do not want to sit in the dark next to their partner watching an overwhelmingly sexy male lead. Both halves of that sentence matter. It is not a statement about women. It’s a statement about couches. And our own insecurities. We want a horror film that tantalizes us but not that much. Think Lovecraft by Disney, marketed as the next big thing.

Because the second either person starts doing the arithmetic — is he looking, is she comparing, what does it mean that neither of us has said anything for a while — the movie has stopped being an experience the two of them are having together and become a contest one of them is losing big time. And you cannot sell a franchise to somebody who lost.

So you cast Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.

Look at them. Warm. Competent. Good on the eyes, but not too good, if you get my meaning. Married on screen and believably so. Handsome and lovely in the way of people who’d be good at their jobs and fine at a barbecue. Nobody in any row in any theater in the world is threatened by the Warrens. They are the most non-threatening possible people to be terrified alongside.

Now run the control. Put Henry Cavill and Sydney Sweeney in exactly that film. Same script, same director, same haunted farmhouse, same doll. Beat for beat.

It doesn’t work. And it doesn’t fail because they’re bad — it fails because you are no longer watching a married couple investigate a haunting. Even if you dirt them up and add a couple of pounds. You are watching Henry Cavill — every interview he does with a female co-lead you can see their eyes go gooey over him — and Sydney Sweeney — “has great jeans” — be in a room. The demon is now the third most interesting thing on screen. Half the audience is having a reaction to a face and the other half has noticed that the first half is having a reaction to a face, and the actual movie is happening somewhere behind all of that, unattended.

That’s the whole distinction. A face you can see past is a window. A face you can only see at is a mirror. Franchise horror is built almost entirely out of windows.

And then, in the middle of that conversation, the American Eagle ad came up again.

Same ad. Different room. Different people. Second time in a fortnight.

That’s when I stopped thinking of it as a commercial and started thinking of it as a weather event.

And Now It’s Happening Again, On Schedule

Which brings us to the reason I’m writing this down rather than just muttering about it.

On September 9, 2026, a company called Novig launched its first national campaign. Sydney Sweeney, nude, holding sports equipment in strategic positions. The tagline is “Novig is just sports.”

Within days: Olympians publicly furious. Athletes across multiple countries calling it out, Canadian athletes leading a chunk of it, the phrase “absolute utter disbelief” doing the rounds. CNN, Variety, Deadline, the full apparatus.

And Sweeney lost more than 200,000 Instagram followers over it.

Now here’s the part I find genuinely, blackly funny. What she actually says in the ad is that Novig doesn’t let you bet on “wars, or death, and no politics.”

That’s the pitch. Novig is a prediction market — you trade contracts on outcomes rather than placing fixed-odds bets like a traditional sportsbook — and its competitive differentiation is that it’s the wholesome one. The one that won’t let you take a position on a war.

They are selling moral restraint, using a nude ad, and the moral restraint is the actual product feature.

You could not write it. You’d get notes.

And the analysis from people who study this for a living lands exactly where my gut did. Stephen Warren at Northeastern:

“Now, they’re doing it almost like an instigating troll sort of thing.”

And the line that made me sit up, because it’s the whole historical argument in one sentence:

“Maybe 15, 20 years ago, someone putting out an ad like this was doing it for the sole reason of thinking ‘she is attractive, that’s going to make people want this service.’”

Fifteen years ago the ad was the message. Now the ad is the fuse. The product isn’t the thirty seconds of video. The product is the week of argument, and the video is just the cheapest available way to start one.

His colleague Rachel Rodgers called the approach “dated” and cynical, which is also true, and which does not stop it from working. Those aren’t in tension. Dated and effective is most of advertising.

Now the Receipts, Including the One That Wrecks My Own Argument

So — did the first one work?

The obvious answer is hell yes. American Eagle’s “great jeans” campaign dropped in July 2025, the internet detonated over the genes/jeans wordplay, it became a political story, and AEO stock surged roughly 25%. Every marketing newsletter on earth wrote it up as the year’s masterclass. The company itself credited the campaign with boosting sales and brand awareness.

Case closed. Controversy works.

Except.

I went and looked at what happened after the news cycle, and this is where it gets interesting and where I have to be honest about a hole in the thesis.

By this June, American Eagle reported brand sales down 2% for the quarter. And the decline was attributed primarily to — and you are going to enjoy this — women’s bottoms.

The category she was selling. The jeans. The actual jeans.

Jen Foyle, the company’s President and Chief Creative Officer, on the earnings call, in the driest possible phrasing:

“We are not satisfied with where the business performed this quarter, especially in women’s.”

So the stock went up twenty-five percent and the jeans went down.

That is not a small wrinkle. That’s a hole in the middle of the “outrage sells product” story, and anybody making the simple version of my argument needs to deal with it.

Here’s how I deal with it, and I think the reconciliation is more interesting than either side.

Attention and Conversion Are Now Two Different Products

The campaign did not fail. It just succeeded at something other than selling jeans.

It bought a share price. It bought a brand-awareness spike. It bought two separate meetings in my calendar and a year of my thinking and, eventually, this post. What it did not buy was a woman in Ohio deciding to purchase a specific pair of pants.

Because those are now two separately priced things, and only one of them is cheap.

Attention is cheap and instant. You can buy a week of global conversation for the cost of one photoshoot and the nerve to withstand a news cycle. It hits the stock immediately, because markets trade on narrative and narrative is made of exactly this.

Conversion is expensive and slow. It needs product, fit, price, distribution, and — crucially — a customer who was not made to feel like a punchline or a combatant in someone else’s culture war while shopping for denim.

Because the mechanism that generates the attention is the same mechanism that makes a chunk of your buyers not want to be seen in the thing.

Which means Novig, a startup that needs name recognition far more than it needs any individual customer this quarter, is running exactly the correct play for its stage. And American Eagle, an established retailer that needed to move units, ran a play that was optimized for somebody else’s problem.

Same ad strategy. Different companies. One of them was right.

You Cannot Ask a Vice Company to Have a Conscience

Now to the part of the discourse that makes me want to lie down.

The objections to the Novig ad are: it degrades women in sports, it glamorizes sex to sell gambling, it promotes body image issues. And I want to say clearly that the athletes have a real grievance — women in sport spend their careers fighting to be covered for what their bodies do rather than how they look, and a nude ad selling betting on that same sport walks directly into that wound. That’s not confected outrage. That’s people with standing.

But here is where the argument goes wrong.

You are asking a gambling company to uphold a moral standard.

A sports betting platform is, structurally, a business that monetizes a vice. That’s not an insult, it’s a description of the category. Asking it to advertise responsibly is asking it to be less good at the only thing it does.

It’s like asking a beer company in the nineties to run the honest ad. Not the beach, the volleyball, the bikinis, the impossibly clean cooler. The next morning. The hangover. Your face on the tile at six a.m. making noises a mammal shouldn’t make. That’s a Robin Williams bit, not a Bud Light spot, and everybody knows exactly why.

Or tobacco. The industry sold you sensuality — the post-coital cigarette, the two silhouettes, the smoke curling in the blue light. The honest version is lung cancer. Addiction. Your coat smelling like an ashtray in a taxi. Being in bed with someone whose sweat has nicotine in it.

Nobody was ever going to make that ad. The only reason tobacco advertising eventually got honest is that the law came and made it honest, at gunpoint, over decades, after a great many people died.

So: yes, the ad is cynical. Yes, it’s aimed at exactly the reaction it got. And no, the company was never, at any point, going to choose otherwise on its own, because the thing you’re objecting to is the product working.

So How Would You Actually Stop It

Two ways, and only two, and one of them is on you.

One: regulate it. That’s what happened to tobacco. It took decades, it took litigation, it took bodies, and it worked. Gambling advertising is already restricted in a lot of jurisdictions and the direction of travel is obvious. That’s the real lever, and it’s slow, and it’s not in this blog post’s power.

Two: stop paying for it.

Because every share, every quote-tweet, every furious thread, every op-ed — including this one, and I’m not pretending otherwise — is an unpaid media buy. The outrage isn’t a side effect of the campaign. The outrage is the distribution.

If you want to stop seeing Sydney Sweeney in provocative ads, the mechanism is not to make her the villain. She’s the instrument, and going after the instrument is both unkind and strategically useless. The mechanism is to make the ad boring. Deny it the second act. Let it be thirty seconds of video that nobody argues about, and watch how fast the strategy gets defunded.

Which nobody will do. Obviously. I’m not naive.

And so we are now on a release schedule. Next year there’ll be another one. It will be more daring, because escalation is the only direction available once you’ve established the floor. It’ll be a new iPhone — same event, same week, slightly thinner, everybody performs surprise.

The Man Who Called This in 1890

Which brings me to the quote I’ve been circling this whole time, and it’s Oscar Wilde, not Oliver, which is what my phone heard and what I apparently said out loud.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890. Lord Henry Wotton, who never met a moral he couldn’t bill by the hour:

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

A hundred and thirty-six years ago, in a novel about a man who outsources the cost of his own image to a painting in the attic, somebody wrote down the entire operating principle of modern advertising in nineteen words.

It isn’t a joke. It’s a strategy document. And the reason it still runs is that it was never really about scandal — it was about the arithmetic underneath, which is that indifference is the only thing that actually kills you.

American Eagle got talked about and their jeans sales fell. Novig got talked about and, at their stage, that’s the whole win.

And a very serious man with gray at his temples, in a room where nobody has ever run a meeting sixteen minutes, gave an hour of a large tech company’s time to a denim commercial he had no connection to whatsoever.

Wilde would have charged him for it.

Rant over. Not sorry, and fully aware I just did the thing.

Somewhere there’s a chronograph room where a fifteen-minute meeting is starting on time, and somewhere else a media buyer is looking at this post in a spreadsheet,

and one of us is getting paid.