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Glossy Pop Newsletter: From American Eagle to E.l.f., brands prove social media is changing the advertising machine

Glossy Pop Newsletter: From American Eagle to E.l.f., brands prove social media is changing the advertising machine

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In late July, American Eagle dropped what it called its largest-ever campaign, headlined by Sydney Sweeney, dubbed “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

But you already know that.

Because within days, reactions to the campaign took over TikTok, Threads, Substack and beyond. There were parodies, comments that Sweeney was over-sexualized, and criticism that the campaign’s genes/jeans pun, paired with Sweeney’s blonde hair and blue eyes, had racial undertones and even hinted at eugenics.

By August 1, American Eagle issued a statement: “‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”

And then, on August 11, E.l.f. Cosmetics debuted a campaign dubbed “The Law Offices of e.l.f.ino & Schmarnes,” with an ad featuring comedian Matt Rife and drag queen Heidi N’ Closet. And TikTok got loud again. Creators took to the app to document themselves throwing away E.l.f. products, while others offered dupes from other affordable brands like Essence and Milani. But there were also videos defending the campaign, defending “dark comedy,” noting that throwing away products was wasteful, or simply stating that they would continue to buy from E.l.f.

But, by August 13, E.l.f. had also issued a statement: “You know us, we’re always listening and we’ve heard you. This campaign aimed to humorously spotlight beauty injustice. We understand we missed the mark with people we care about in our e.l.f. Community. While e.l.f.ino & schmarnes closes today, we’ll continue to make the case against overpriced beauty.”

When reached for comment, a representative for E.l.f. told Glossy, “There was a clear gap between our recent campaign’s intention to humorously spotlight beauty injustice and the outcome, and we take that to heart. We’re taking this moment to ensure our storytelling continues to reflect our values.”

Both campaigns were widely accused of “rage bait” by TikTokers. To that, Doug Gary Scott, a former Ogilvy executive and marketing adviser and founder of the agency Olliewood, said, “I don’t know that any brand goes out there to rage-market. I do believe in the desire for a marketer to create a disruptive moment in society; to create virality is what every marketer wants to achieve today.”

What’s undeniable is that TikTok has changed advertising dramatically.

In 2022, the Glossy Pop newsletter reported on TikTok’s response to a Prada mailer featuring delicate Christmas ornaments that were easily breaking. The general public wondered aloud if the ornaments were, in fact, breaking by design.

In 2025, anyone with a mini-mic can declare their thoughts on marketing from the comfort of their bedrooms, and some of those videos will rack up millions of views.

What these controversies reveal isn’t just that brands sometimes “miss the mark,” but also that the very nature of advertising has shifted.

TikTok has turned ad campaigns into cultural events, subject to instant parody, politicization and backlash. An ad is no longer a one-way communication from brand-to-customer — it’s open-source content, essentially co-authored in real time by millions of viewers with an iPhone and an opinion. For brands, this means every campaign also initiates a referendum — on the product, on the creative and, often, on the values behind it.

Scott calls this “moment marketing.”

“We’re in a scroll-based society. We scroll through and we consume what’s in front of us in the moment. [In the past], an ad would come on, and it maybe disrupted me in my living room. I may be tuned into it, I may not. I didn’t have a way to speak back to it, though. I didn’t have TikTok. I didn’t have Facebook and Instagram,” he said.

Regardless of these brands’ intentions, their campaigns elicited huge reactions spanning hundreds of videos. “As a society, we are in a moment of polarization, of heightened emotion, of reactivity,” said Sara McCord, founder and CEO of Sara McCord Communications, a “values-led marketing agency.” Though the phrase “all publicity is good publicity” may have been true at one point, that was when “there were gatekeepers, before cancel culture and before virality,” McCord said.

McCord pointed to a greater cultural shift in how we consume and process news. “[People] have been socialized to enjoy having people talk us through what we’re seeing,” she said. “Multiple generations who are so active on social media have grown up with this idea that the news isn’t just reported, but it’s also opined on. And because of the accessibility of everything from smartphones to podcasting equipment, the lines between who the true experts are and who just sounds like they know what they’re talking about — who are the people with platforms — are blurred,” McCord said.

Of course, access can be a good thing, too. As McCord noted, social media makes it possible for more voices to be heard, including minority voices, women’s voices and younger voices.

According to Rachel Lowenstein, a culture strategist, brand consultant and TikToker with 88,000 followers, brands need to move away from relying on data to inform casting decisions and lean more into sentiment. “[E.l.f.] is like the golden child of culturally-intelligent marketing — and yet [Matt Rife] is so contentious among women and girls,” Lowenstein said, referring to the backlash Rife received after making jokes about domestic violence in a 2023 Netflix special. “The backlash [about his special] wasn’t a small underground conversation — it was pretty front and center.”

In an interview with The Business of Fashion, E.l.f.’s CMO Kory Marchisotto said the brand had chosen Rife due to his significant overlap with the brand’s target female Gen-Z audience. Marchisotto said his TikTok base is 80% female and 75% under the age of 34 — “so, right in the sweet spot.”

“Brands need to hire more culture strategists — people who actually live in culture and are obsessed with it, especially girl culture, which moves so differently,” Lowenstein said.

While discussing the aforementioned Prada ornaments, as well as similar social media kerfuffles like Chanel’s $825 advent calendar in 2023, Lowenstein said the resulting rage likely had less impact on the companies compared to the impact felt by American Eagle and E.l.f. after their campaigns. “Chanel and Prada may or may not care if Gen Z thinks their products are outrageously overpriced, because they’re going after a specific set of consumers.” E.l.f. and American Eagle’s ads, meanwhile, “went after people who are not their customers and appealed to people who aren’t going to buy their products,” she posited.

The question of whether or not consumers will quickly forgive and forget remains to be seen. American Eagle’s store traffic dipped in the aftermath of the Sweeney controversy. But when President Trump commented on the campaign, the company’s stock soared. On August 27, the brand released a collaboration with Travis Kelce, the day after his engagement to Taylor Swift. The company’s stock received another boost. It’s too soon to understand the campaign’s results, in full — but TikTok marketing analysts are already working to decode what it all means.

Overall, the experts interviewed for this piece disagreed on the long-term impact of a campaign gone wrong. “If you piss somebody off enough that they’re throwing away your product and filming it, they’re not going to come back, because they have choice,” Lowenstein said. “20 “Twenty years ago, there were a few makeup brands, and that was it. Now, there are hundreds of makeup brands you can get that are cheap.”

Scott, however, said the outrage is short-lived. “People are throwing out E.l.f. products because it’s a movement. But sooner or later, they wake up from this rage hangover, this social media hangover, and [they’re] like, ‘Wait a second, I just dumped $100 worth of products that I actually really liked, but I was in this moment where I was on the bandwagon.”

Regardless of intent, everyone interviewed agreed that rage-baiting customers should never be a brand goal. “It’s easy to outrage somebody,” Lowenstein said. “It’s much harder to do what Gap did [with its denim campaign featuring Katseye] and delight somebody, and make them lock in because they have a positive reaction to a brand.”