Diamond: American Eagle
There’s no rule that says marketing campaigns need to be subtle to be effective. American Eagle’s recipe involves taking a gorgeous, pouting young actress, Sydney Sweeney, adding a dollop of wordplay around “great jeans”, then sitting back and waiting for the product to fly off the shelves and the dollars to fill the piggy bank.
With the ad notching up 40-billion impressions and counting, the signature jeans-line sold out within a week, American Eagle announced that second-quarter performance exceeded expectations and the share price jumped 25%.
The campaign’s impact wasn’t exactly hurt by becoming another battleground in the US culture war; left-leaning commentators accused it of promoting eugenics, prompting the usual howls of anti-woke indignation from Fox News and the pussy-grabber-in-chief, who took to Truth Social to announce that “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there.”
The campaign will continue to run in the second half of the year, with new tweaks expected soon.
It’s not just about Sweeney, however, as American Eagle is also collaborating with Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce, who has won three Super Bowls but is considerably better known for being engaged to Taylor Swift.
The company had been in something of a sales slump before the campaigns acted as a reset, and it said it expected to maintain its positive momentum with more to come in the second half.
Tariffs are expected to add about $70m in costs, but this is half what it had originally expected.
PRINT HEAD: Declawed and neutered
Dog: Jaguar Land Rover
The anti-woke brigade have been gunning for Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) ever since Jaguar launched a rebrand in November last year, dropping its leaping cat logo and airing an advert that featured a large number of androgynous and diverse specimens wearing some sort of space suit for no apparent reason — and not a single car in sight.
President Donald Trump called it “stupid” and “a total disaster”; Elon Musk asked: “Do you sell cars?”; and Nigel Farage weighed in with his learned opinion that the company deserved to go bust.
Then the tariff wars began, and JLR was forced to pause shipments to the US, its single biggest market with about 25% of total sales. Despite a trade deal that allowed 100,000 British cars into the US at a 10% tariff, in August JLR announced that its quarterly profits were down 49%.
Just as it was licking its wounds from this latest blow, along came a hacker who may be called Rey, or possibly the catchy “Scattered LAPSUS$ hunters 4.0”, who breached its systems and shut down production lines in the UK, Slovakia, Brazil and India.
It’s not just the lost production that’s hammering the company, all its systems are out of action so cars can’t be serviced without its diagnostic testing, spare parts catalogues are inaccessible and new vehicles can be sold but can’t be driven without being registered.
The knock-on effects are being felt throughout its supply chain, and the company has admitted that it’s likely to take weeks rather than days to get up and running again. This won’t be the last high-profile hack.
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