Mythbusted: American Eagle and Dunkin’ and the risk of ignoring cultural context in ads

American Eagle has joined the increasingly long list of brands that somehow didn’t see it coming. 

Like Bud Light, Target and Jaguar Land Rover before it, the retailer stepped into the culture wars with the kind of casual confidence that suggests senior marketers are still underestimating how combustible “just another campaign” can be. In this case, it was an ad featuring a white, blue-eyed blond film star Sydney Sweeney praising the culture of “good jeans” — a line that might’ve passed without notice a decade ago, now reads more like a Rorscharch test for who brands think they’re speaking to. 

It landed awkwardly amid ongoing cultural scrutiny of representation, identity and who gets to be the face of America cool. And it didn’t help that Dunkin’ had just aired an ad with actor Gavin Casalegno boasting that his sun-kissed glow came down to “genetics.”

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