The intersection of CEOs' glee at layoffs and the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle 'gene' ad

Forty years ago, I worked summers and holidays while in college at the American Eagle Outfitters store in South Hills Village in suburban Pittsburgh. It was the best high school/college job I had. Not because of the pay or the folding (to this day, I hate to fold clothes), but because I’ve always loved to talk and meet new people.

Schmooze and entertain, if you will.

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A colleague once griped to our manager that I talked too much and got preferential treatment. Our manager didn’t skip a beat. “John’s here for our entertainment,” he said. “If you have a problem with it, you can leave.” That moment stuck with me, not just because it felt like a small personal victory, but because, in retrospect, it foretold a future I couldn’t yet imagine.

I was destined to be a bullshit artist, a.k.a. a public relations professional.

I went on to work in corporate public relations, with stops at Toys “R” Us, then Sears, Kmart, and finally Macy’s. Retail PR is no picnic. It’s cutthroat. And PR in general is tenuous. The first department slashed when sales slump or stocks stumble is almost always PR. We’re seen as dispensable. I always said we were the redheaded stepchild of marketing.

With apologies and utmost respect for redheads.

I know the drill because I’ve lived it: laid off three times from corporate PR gigs. Twice because of workforce reductions. Another time because a company went private and the new owners gutted our team.

And each time, I got the same cold, canned HR script: “This isn’t about your performance.” Whatever. Then came the severance crumbs, the COBRA paperwork, the frozen email access. You feel like you’ve been ghosted by your own career.

So what does any of this have to do with Sydney Sweeney and her “great genes” in American Eagle’s latest ad campaign?

Everything.

Because the same corporate dysfunction that discarded me and millions of others without a second thought is the exact force that green-lit an ad campaign many people now find tone-deaf at best, offensive at worst.

The ad in question features Sweeney, a white, blond actress, with the tagline touting her “great jeans,” or, depending how you read it, “great genes.” It’s borderline subtle, intended to innocent, but loaded with racial and historical baggage. In Nazi Germany, eugenics and racism were used to erase anyone who wasn’t blond and blue-eyed, barbarically the Hitler regime’s attempt to create the so-called master race.

I recently wrote in a column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the racist memes circulating around my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin. There are tropes and slurs and insinuations that some people don’t recognize, and a lot of people do, like me, do. It’s the same thing here. The word “genes,” paired with a very specific image of white beauty, sends a message that not everyone can afford to ignore.

The real question isn’t how this happened. It’s how no one stopped it.

I can tell you how. Because I’ve been in those branding/ad campaign meetings. At Sears, I was once invited to review a new marketing campaign: “Sears Ignites the Home with Ideas.” Everyone was nodding along, pleased with themselves. But my media-trained, consumer-wary mind screamed, “Fire! Disaster!”

So I raised my hand and asked, “Is anyone else thinking about a three-alarm fire?” After there was some tense looking around the table, with murmuring, I’m pretty sure the campaign didn’t see the light of day. I was lucky to be in the room, and dare I say bold enough to speak up.

Most people don’t, because speaking up means risking your job. I think that’s why so few people are stepping forward with all the travesty going on within the federal government. Coming forward is rarely a good thing, and that’s a sad statement.

What likely happened with American Eagle’s Sweeney campaign is what happens all the time in corporate America: An outside agency pitched the idea. People in the room, likely overwhelmed by timelines, talent contracts, performance metrics, and most of all money, drank the Kool-Aid.

Nothing clicked in anyone’s mind in the room about using the word “genes” with a white, blond, blue-eye person.

Presumably, the idea traveled up the ladder, gathering momentum with each nod, each sign-off, until no one could ask a basic question like, “Wait, does this play differently in a nation roiled by racial division entrenched by the Trump administration?”

Corporate America, especially right now, is not incentivized to ask hard questions. Look at what’s happening across industries. DEI programs are quietly being dismantled to appease political pressure. Companies are falling over themselves to align with the mood in Washington, where Trump’s second term has ushered in not only a new wave of cruelty to immigrants and health care cuts but a climate where cruelty itself seems to be the point.

CEOs are now bragging about layoffs. A recent Wall Street Journal article outlined how executives are touting “leaner headcounts” as business strategies and boasting about it. LinkedIn News posted about it being a badge of honor. Gone is the empathy. It wasn’t much there to begin with, from what I experienced, but CEOs were a little more careful about how they talked about a shrinking workforce. My first thought was that Elon Musk's gleeful chain saw act, celebrating arbitrary firings, might have started a trend.

American Eagle’s parent company does still publicly support DEI initiatives. But that doesn’t mean the people in the room for this ad were equipped or empowered to recognize the implications.

Whether it’s Dove’s infamous ad that appeared to equate whiteness with cleanliness, or H&M’s “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” hoodie debacle, these blunders follow a pattern: Too few people with too much power and too little cultural fluency or too afraid to speak up. That, or they are either woefully tone-deaf.

Because here’s the truth about corporate life that is not news to anyone: It’s never about protecting the people below you. It’s always about appeasing the layer above you. That’s the real corporate gene, survival through sycophancy. “Yes” wins hearts, minds, bonuses, and promotions. While the word “no” means your job is on the line or perceived to be, or you’re looked at as a troublemaker.

And here’s what “yes” gets you: absolutely nothing. When your company tanks, changes ownership, or makes cuts, all those layers above you won’t remember your loyalty. They’ll call you into a cold room or on a Zoom call with someone from HR and tell you not to take it personally. They’ll say it’s not about performance.

It never is. It’s about the money, unless of course you said no too many times to the layer above you, in which case, it is about your performative behavior.

For speaking up about “ignite,” I didn't pay any price; however, my guess is that someone at American Eagle or its ad agency is going to get the ax or some form of punishment for not thinking smartly about the negative effects of gene + white, blond, and blue-eyed.

Or, and here’s the shocking truth. Perhaps with all this publicity, sales for American Eagle Outfitter jeans spike because of the controversy, in which case, there’ll be high-fives all around. But it seems, someone might be paying the price.

It looks like it’s the latter. According to reports, American Eagle is quietly auditioning a new face behind the curtain, a social media manager, after parting ways with the last one.

It's a striking intersection of corporate indifference, where there’s little empathy for the employees being let go, coupled with brands being equally unempathetic to how a tone-deaf campaign might adversely affect part of its customer base.

There’s never a winner, except, of course, the bottom line. But when the bottom line is a loser, everyone, including employees and customers, becomes sacrificial lambs.

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