For CMOs under intense pressure to show business results while also delivering culture-defining creativity, gut instinct can’t be your leading strategy, especially in the moment a campaign is under pressure. In the opening fireside conversation at OpenAP’s Cannes Audience Summit, 3C Ventures’s Michael Kassan pressed Craig Brommers, CMO of American Eagle, on how deep audience knowledge, not confidence alone, converts creative risk into measurable business results.
Take American Eagle’s recent “Good Jeans” campaign with Sydney Sweeney–what may have looked like a marketing faux pas based on online (and mostly bot) sentiment in the first 24 hours actually drove incredible business results–and was all thanks to a deep understanding of the brand’s Gen Z audience and what would resonate with them above the social noise. “The very first day we launched the campaign, the stock went up 25%,” Brommers recalled.
"We knew that Sydney very much was aspirational to our Gen Z customer base."
When backlash spiked in the campaign's first 24 hours, Brommers didn't look to social media sentiment to gauge whether the work had landed. He turned to the research, commissioning an overnight poll to test how the campaign actually read across demographic and political lines. "Any story that you read out there that said this was a campaign barraged by negativity is actually untrue... about 25% of the negativity in social media were bots," Brommers said, arguing that audience data, not online noise, was the only reliable signal in the moment.
"Since the dawn of Brooke Shields in Calvin Klein, having the It Girl of the moment in jeans is like marketing 101 in my industry — so it was radical but not actually that radical."
That audience conviction showed up directly in the numbers: after the initial jump in stock price, it continued to climb 180% over the course of the campaign. For Brommers, that chain–audience insight, creative confidence, business result–is the whole model.
“I had complete commitment and support from our board and our CEO. That wasn't because of the moment. That was because I'd put in the work, and our team had put in the work, years before.”
"I actually think my industry is entertainment," he said, describing a brand strategy built less around single campaigns and more around a continuous read of what its audience wants to watch next. "A great streaming show has main characters and main plot points, but you do need guest characters and you need plot twists. And every once in a while, you need a WTF moment that everyone's talking about."