Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? Things slowing down for you in August? You know who it’s not slowing down for? American Eagle. So today I thought we would talk about communications and what to do when you’re faced with a series of bad choices.
What Would You Do (Marketing Edition)
This was a big week for public-facing marketing stories, so I thought we’d play a game. That game is called “What the hell would you do in this situation?”
Sound fun? No? Well, then while we’re all doing this you can go over to LinkedIn and comment “FLUSH!” to get 372 AI agents that I used to run my plumbing business.
Yes? Great! You’re in the right place.
Here’s how it works:
I’m going to present a marketing story, and you’re going to pretend you’re the VP of Comms (or PR or whatever title you’d like to make up for yourself. You can make yourself the “Sexy VP of Communications” if that’s how you like to role play. Or you can be the bookish VP of Marketing who works in an office where a hunky Doordash guy drops off lunch every day, but you think he’s never noticed you, but oh, he’s noticed you. Tho he lives in a neighborhood in Brooklyn you’ve never even heard of (Pomodoro Heights), and it could never possibly work, because you’re a go-getter executive who’s worked at this greeting card company since you got your fancy MBA, and he barely graduated high school. That could never work! Never! But that one day when you and your friend Melina - the arty one of mixed race (but not threateningly so) who works at that gallery - drags you out to a street fair in Pomodoro Heights and you absolutely could not believe it - the Doordash guy was there! And he’s there with his niece! Obviously you assumed that was his daughter, but no - he’s just a really great uncle and he just loves taking his niece to street fairs, because her parents got divorced when she was young and now his sister has to raise her all on her own and the niece doesn’t have a real dad figure in her life, and that seems unlikely to change any time soon, since your sister works nights at the hospital and when would she ever have time to date? She wouldn’t! But somehow you agree that you’ll meet him and the niece at a unicycle meet-up the following weekend and - no - this could never work, he’s from Pomodoro Heights! But a few weeks later you’re at his Nonna’s Sunday supper and it’s his big ethnic family and you’re not used to that because you’re from a non-ethnic, Christmas-loving family that barely ever raises their voices, and these guys - whoa! - the nonstop talk about da Yankees and arguing about the gravy for the noodles! Aye marone! And maybe - maybe it can work! Maybe love really will conquer all! “The Dashing Gentleman” this Tuesday at 8pm on Hallmark.)
So you’re the VP of Communications and you work for a company, and I’ll present you with the situation and you have to decide what the hell you’re going to do. Here we go…
But first:
Why Oh Why Are Partnership Programs So Difficult?
I have a little secret that software marketers don’t like to discuss. But because Gobbledy is about nothing if it’s not about truth-telling, here goes:
A partnership program is probably the most difficult marketing strategy to do well.
Yeah, nobody likes to talk about that. Partner programs are all, “Hey - THEY do the work, and we just roll around in a giant pile of deals that they bring us. Awesome!”
Alas, not quite.
Except for attracting partners, managing the partners, giving the partners the assets they need, keeping the partners happy, tracking the leads the partners give you, tracking the deals that actually close from those partners, and paying those partners, it’s easy!
But what if it actually were that easy? SoundGTM thinks it should be.
Imagine you had a team of 27+ AI agents guiding you through the entire partnership process - that would certainly make it easier.
And what if those agents were (wait, am I reading this right?) $99/month? Seems like at that price you might want to learn a bit more about how SoundGTM does it? No? I’d think so:
Sound interesting? Click Here to Learn More about SoundGTM and their $99/month deal for Gobbledy readers (plus their 7-day free trial!)
Situation: The Eagle Has Landed (on Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans/Genes/Geenz)
If somehow you have avoided reading about this situation, I applaud you and I’m jealous. But even if you have read about this situation, it’s worth learning why we’re even talking about it.
So jeans-slinger American Eagle hires actress-who-is-literally-everywhere Sydney Sweeney for a campaign that I found reminiscent of the Calvin Klein Brooke Shields ad from the 1980s (“Want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”):
And now that you’ve watched that I’m going to make you vomit by letting you know that she was 15 in that ad. And at the time pretty much nobody was out there saying, “Isn’t it a little weird that this 15 year old girl is talking like that? Or, specifically, that a bunch of old men hired her and wrote a script where she talked like that?” And that maybe nobody thought it was weird because a few years before that she starred in the Louis Malle film Pretty Baby where she played a 12 year old prostitute (????)? And that maybe it isn’t surprising that she had a complicated relationship with her mother.
Anyway, Sydney Sweeney stars in an ad that’s kinda reminiscent of the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad, though Sweeney’s script has her saying something about having “great jeans,” and also “great genes” and so forth. And the “whatever” is that blah blah blah blah online discourse about whether she’s a white supremacist because blonde hair and genes, etc.
So why are we talking about this?
Thanks to the always great Garbage Day newsletter, we now know why we are talking about it. And you will not be shocked to hear that this goes back to Twitter/X, a website that is the digital equivalent of a bus station bathroom, only much worse.
In short: a finance Twitter account posts about the Sweeney ad campaign. Meme stock accounts joke that because she is attractive, American Eagle’s stock will go up. (also probably not a joke?) The meme stock accounts are followed by crypto accounts, which are followed by far-right accounts, which suggest “wokeness” is dead because attractive women are now back to starring in clothing ads. And then blah blah blah, Fox News starts talking about it as a way of (conspiracy alert) pushing the Trump/Epstein stuff out of the news, and then the usual suspects (Ted Cruz, et al) glom onto it and please, dear God, make it stop.
So that’s what happened. Popular actress stars in an ad that becomes politicized.
Remember to the original idea of the newsletter - you run communications for American Eagle. What the hell do you do?
I’ll present to you 4 options:
You post a straightforward statement on Instagram saying that this is just a campaign about great jeans. In fact, this is what they did:
You ignore it. I mean, how long can this ridiculousness go on for?
You pull the ads and say that American Eagle stands for diversity and inclusivity and you’re incredibly sorry that the ads offended some people and you’ll try to do better in the future.
You tell the, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for here? Fuckwads. Yes, that’s the word I’m looking for - fuckwads that you don’t even want them buying your jeans if they can’t just respect an advertisement that is clearly about female empowerment and celebrating how people wear jeans and not about watching a very popular actress put her pants on suggestively.
Let’s discuss those options:
Option 1: Put out a statement on Instagram saying you’re excited to continue celebrating confidence. This is actually a hilarious approach, and I can’t believe they thought this would accomplish anything in today’s political climate. I appreciate that they tried this as a piece of performance art titled, “Hey, remember how PR worked in the 1970s?”
Option 2: Ignore it. The risk here is that you end up in a Bud Light situation where it takes on a life of its own and you’ll be forced to address it at some point, if only because your revenue has been so impacted. Yet - the way this has played out, some people have embraced the campaign, some think she’s a white supremacist, and maybe that balances itself out. I actually think “ignore it” it the best of these options.
Option 3: Pull the ads. Giving in to the mob generally feels like a zero sum game (or worse). Yes, some people stop bothering you afterwards, but then you’ve lost others who are annoyed that you gave in. Ask Target how their business has fared since they pulled their Pride displays out of their stores (they’ll answer, “it’s been bad.”)
Option 4: Stand your ground. I think there are brands where, “they hate us cuz they ain’t us” would be an appropriate response. But American Eagle has been firmly planted in the jeans-for-middle-American-teens world forever, so I can’t imagine them wanting to go with this. But damn, it would be satisfying.
Which option would you choose?
Also acceptable: Cry that this is the current state of denim marketing.
Just Give the Dog His Grilled Chicken
If you’ve been reading Gobbledy for a little while, you may have noticed that - from time to time - I may be prone to hyperbole. Maybe sometimes I say, “this is the worst example of homepage messaging” and I don’t really mean “it’s the worst.” Like it’s terrible, but there’s so much terrible that it’s hard to exact parse the terrible from the merely awful from the actual worst.
For example, I know that these 3 paragraphs from a recent Wall Street Journal article about private jets are the abso-freaking-lutely worst. The. Worst. But like the worst what? Maybe you can tell me:
Tennille Holt, 44, retired in 2023 and now spends much of her time traveling the world with her husband and 8-year-old cavapoo, Hudson. Hudson has his own Instagram account documenting his life, including his private-jet flights, where he is often served his favorite: grilled chicken.
She and her husband spent around $200,000 to fly Hudson from Australia to Los Angeles in a Bombardier Global 6000 and avoid the commercial flight. She recalls dreaming about this flexibility while working long days and nights as an entrepreneur.
“The goal was to create the freedom to live life on our own terms, which now includes plenty of travel and the ability to fly privately whenever we want, ” Holt said. “It’s the best and most comfortable option for Hudson.”
Look - this newsletter is ostensibly about the language of marketing, and the words we use to tell stories about our products. And does this fit into that? Hm. I believe Ms. Holt is an online presence and is therefore always selling herself, so I see this as fair game.
Here’s a suggestion: If you have a cavapoo, and that cavapoo has an Instagram account documenting his life (including his private jet flights where he is “often” served his favorite - grilled chicken!) and you spend $200,000 of your hard-earned dollars making sure that you can provide “the best and most comfortable option” for that cavapoo, please know that I will think that you are the worst person on earth.
Now, maybe that’s the idea - it’s probably easier to make a name for yourself as the most despised person on earth (see: Tesla’s CEO) than it is to be the most admired person on earth (see: Willie Nelson? I’m not sure.), so maybe that’s not a crazy branding decision.
As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part. If you want to reach marketers at what I can best describe as “a very reasonable price,” we should talk about advertising in the newsletter. I’m at jared@sagelett.com.
P.S. - I had forgotten how truly incredible Tina Turner was as a performer until I just came across this clip of her performing Proud Mary on the Ed Sullivan Show. There’s no Beyonce without Tina (tho somehow Beyonce has brought it to a whole other level). Enjoy…
I'd say the most admired person on Earth, at this moment, is Dolly Parton. But I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.
You should 100% write for the Hallmark Channel.