Sex sells, woke doesn't

[SVPete]

Sex sells, woke doesn't

https://tomknighton.substack.com/p/sex-sells-woke-doesnt

Sydney Sweeney’s ad for American Eagle wasn’t anything groundbreaking. A pretty actress wearing the clothing of a denim company, echoing their marketing tagline, all in an effort to get people to walk into their stores and buy their products.
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Everyone on the left absolutely lost their minds, but the company, American Eagle, didn’t budge. They somehow recognized that this wasn’t a Dylan Mulvaney moment for them, so they held firm.

And, it seems that paid off for them.

In the weeks that followed, the campaign proved to be a hit — bringing in almost a million new customers to American Eagle between July and September, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Demand spiked for featured items: the Sweeney Cinched Waist denim jacket sold out in a day, and the Sydney Jean sold out in a week.

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Woke advertising hasn’t really made anyone trip over themselves to buy a product. Companies like Nike, which once made it a point to highlight athletes and athletic-looking folks, eventually started featuring obese models who look like they’d never run for anything except to get to the front of the line for cake. Who sees that and thinks, “I need a good running shoe. Let’s go with the one that uses all the fat models” instead of literally anyone else?

Dylan Mulvaney’s “partnership” with Bud Light, though, will be the lesson in business marketing courses for decades to come, a literal textbook example of what not to do.

Jaquar will also be there, spinning from a brand associated with British luxury and using androgyny and whatever the hell else that pivot was supposed to be about, only to see sales drop 90 percent over the next year.

That’s catastrophic for any company, and why would they do it? Because they thought woke worked, and they figured Bud Light was the anomaly.

The pictured ad, at least, didn't feature Sweeney's cleavage or even her rear end to show the jeans' great fit (wink! wink!). Her pretty face made the products look good.

Bud Light decided the show how socially Prog they are and got an "Ewwwww!" from many customers and many in the general public. Grupo Modelo owes Bud Light thanks for a great year.

Jaguar decided the show how socially Prog they are and car buyers went "WTF?!" and took their €€€€ elsewhere.

I moved from Nike (mid-range shoes on clearance at Nike stores and outlets) to Hoka due to plantar fasciitis. Nike's dalliances with Kaep mean I won't buy Nike shoes, at all. I haven't seen the Nike ads with people more less than fit than I am but can imagine that they are -grade.

[SVPete]

American Eagle CEO Says Company Stands Behind Sydney Sweeney Ads

https://www.theepochtimes.com/entertainment/american-eagle-ceo-says-company-stands-behind-sydney-sweeney-ads-5923270

American Eagle Outfitters’ chief executive has defended the retailer’s ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney, saying the company will not retreat in the face of public criticism.

“You can’t run from fear,” CEO Jay Schottenstein said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We stand behind what we did.”
The campaign, which launched in late July, spotlighted the 27-year-old actress, best known for her roles in “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus,” modeling the brand’s denim line.
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The wordplay drew accusations from some critics who claimed the ads carried undertones of racism, sexism, or eugenics. The company declined to alter or withdraw the campaign.

Schottenstein, an Orthodox Jew, said he was surprised by such associations. He noted that his own family had endured the impact of Nazi Germany and said that if he and his team felt the campaign would be offensive in that way, “we never would’ve done it.”

The strategy appears to have benefited the company. Between July and September, the campaign helped attract nearly 1 million new customers, as reported by the Journal.

Bullies need to be faced down, and American Eagle has been rewarded for doing that by existing and new customers.

[SVPete]

The Unparalleled Genius of Sydney Sweeney: Brains, Beauty, and an Instinct for the Jugular

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2026/09/16/the-unparalleled-genius-of-sydney-sweeney-brains-beauty-and-an-instinct-for-the-jugular-n4957289

Sydney Sweeney should be a feminist hero. While her management team at Paradigm Talent Agency and manager Jennifer Millar support her, Sweeney takes a direct, hands-on role in shaping and executing the strategic narratives behind her projects and commercial endorsements.

Beyond just acting as a brand ambassador, Sweeney actively pitches, crafts, and negotiates equity partnerships for campaigns. For instance, Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky revealed that Sweeney directly approached the company for an equity partnership and helped write and design the messaging for their national ad campaigns.

Through her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, Sweeney retains executive producer control over her projects. This structure allows her to align media appearances, brand partnerships, and promotional tours directly with her production slate.

Isn't this exactly what feminism has been striving for over the last 60 years? A businesswoman with real power and influence, setting her own standards, and controlling her own destiny.
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Like Donald Trump, she has an instinct for the jugular. She knew full well what the reaction would be to her American Eagle jeans ads, and she knew it would send the left over the edge. Just as Trump regularly trolls the left, orchestrating their hysterical reactions to his outrageousness, Sweeney's carefully crafted viral and guerrilla PR strategies generate controversy and keep the product/campaign in front of the public and the press for weeks.
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Sydney Sweeney is in the ad because she's drop-dead gorgeous. Full stop. End of story. The ad is not aimed at women. It is aimed at young, heterosexual men. A Siena College survey found that 48% of men 18-49 have an active account with at least one online sportsbook.

Sweeney haters cannot see past her ....... to realize that she is directly managing her media career very astutely, and at least some of her moves, besides being lucrative, are trolls that leverage the Streisand Eeffect caused by feminazis' outraged howls.

I'm so old, I remember when feministswere defending the jiggle TV of "Charlie's Angels" and "Bay Watch". For some reason, Sydney Sweeney has triggered feminazis into full raging SSDS, .

[ADsOutburst]

American Eagle CEO Says Company Stands Behind Sydney Sweeney Ads

https://www.theepochtimes.com/entertainment/american-eagle-ceo-says-company-stands-behind-sydney-sweeney-ads-5923270

Bullies need to be faced down, and American Eagle has been rewarded for doing that by existing and new customers.

Good. The far-left has no power that we don't give them.

[Ptarmigan]

Wokeness never sells. Duh!

[SVPete]

The world does not lack for beautiful women, so her beauty does not fascinate, but the AWFL's poutrage and Sweeney's game of trolling them for fun and profit is very .

[SVPete]

The Left Is Obsessed With Destroying Sydney Sweeney

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/09/16/the-lefts-is-obsessed-with-destroying-sydney-sweeney-n3819056

Sydney Sweeney, unlike most prominent celebrities who dominate popular culture, doesn't talk about politics, even when asked.

You get no lectures from her about the issues of the day. She neither waves the flag nor kneels when the national anthem is sung. She acts, does ads, and does the required media availabilities, which is another way to say that she does her job without presuming to tell us what to think or bullying us into feeling guilty about anything.

Other celebrities have followed that policy, but they let themselves be bullied into becoming advocates, or indulged in the practice once their celebrity status was secured. Taylor Swift was a notable case; for years she stayed out of politics, but when she was attacked as a white supremacist icon (really?! says who?), she started doing advocacy all the time.

The one thing we know about her politics is that she is a registered Republican, and when you put that together with the obvious fact that white men (and non-white men) find her attractive, she has been coded by the Left as "MAGA."
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Leftists are going nuts over the ad, claiming that she is degrading women's sports by using her feminine body to sell sex to men instead of uplifting women's achievements.

Posing (mostly) nude focuses on the bodies, not the achievements. How dare she?
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This argument is, of course, bovine excrement. Lots of female athletes have done provocative photoshoots(embedded link), including completely nude ones.

It's just that they are all social justice warriors, and certainly not Republicans. If a Republican does what a leftist does, it is bad, because the person, not the action, is what determines the moral worth of the action.

(embedded X post showing seven female athletes' nude magazine cover photos))

Exposing females athlete whiners' hypocrisy was easy, showing those athletes' less than amazing memory and intellectual prowess.

[SVPete]

Guess who trained (from age 12) and competed in MMA and boxing ... https://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/a60745888/sydney-sweeney-mma-boxing/ .

[ADsOutburst]

The Left Is Obsessed With Destroying Sydney Sweeney

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/09/16/the-lefts-is-obsessed-with-destroying-sydney-sweeney-n3819056

Exposing females athlete whiners' hypocrisy was easy, showing those athletes' less than amazing memory and intellectual prowess.

Denying the left what they want is like taking prey from an animal.

[Ralph Wiggum]

I'm going to take y'all back to the 1980's for this golden oldie:





Stephenson's golf ball tub photo shook up the golf world

“How many golf balls would it take to fill a bathtub?”

Dave Branon was speechless when he fielded the question.

“It’s sort of like, ‘What’s the meaning to life?’ I mean, there is no answer,” said Branon, who was in his South Carolina office nearly 25 years ago when Dick Zimmerman called.

Had he not known any better, Branon, then-chairman of the Dunlop Slazenger Group Americas, would have thought the man at the other end of the line was nuts. But Zimmerman was the legendary “photographer to the stars,” and Branon trusted him implicitly.

“Fifty dozen,” Branon suggested.

Not that the photo shoot was intended for reading material.

“Controversial,” said Branon, now retired. “But it was a great marketing tool.”

The December photo in Stephenson’s 1986 calender was not the one that ignited an LPGA firestorm, however. That came five years earlier, when Stephenson posed for Fairway magazine. Lounging on a bed in a white dress, she revealed plenty of left thigh.

Tame by today’s standards, but in the early 1980s, some took exception, such as colleague Jane Blalock. She even penned an op-ed piece for The Miami Herald, wondering whether the LPGA was selling “sex or golf?”

Not that Stephenson didn’t have her backers. Most notably, then-LPGA commissioner Ray Volpe.

“I’m a man. I know what is attractive,” he told Stephenson.

The Aussie agreed to market herself “to help the LPGA,” she said. “Ray told me it was perfect, that people couldn’t say I was doing it just because I couldn’t win.”

Indeed, Stephenson was a mix of athleticism (16 career victories, three majors) and extraordinary sex appeal, and overwhelmingly she was embraced.

https://golfweek.usatoday.com/story/sports/golf/2010/05/19/2010-golfweek-her-stephensons-golf-ball-tub-photo/76764578007/

A disclaimer: I've met Jan Stephenson, who is a World Golf Hall of Fame inductee, not on her sex appeal but on her accomplishments on the golf course. She is a very sweet Aussie lady.