The end of July 2025 was marked by a very notable episode involving a promotional project for American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. a retailer of youth apparel and accessories. American Eagle is a publicly traded company, its stock is traded on NYSE (AEO) and it has an extensive network of stores in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Hong Kong. The company's ambassador is the popular actress Sydney Sweeney, and a few short commercials featuring her have had an impressive effect: within a week, American Eagle's social media following increased by an order of magnitude, the stock price rose by 25%, and the company's capitalization increased by almost half a billion dollars.
What ingenious advertising allowed to get such a stunning result? Only 2 commercials of 15 seconds each. The shooting is made extremely laconically, emphasized cheaply, you can say - in denim style. In the first one, a pretty blonde with a nice figure whispers: «Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue...», then the slogan «Sydney Sweeney has great jeans» and an image of the company logo appears on the screen. The video has now been removed from American Eagle's YouTube channel, but that hasn't stopped it from going viral on other platforms. In the second clip a blonde tries to remove from the wall an impressive-sized poster with her photo and the inscription «Sydney Sweeney has great genes», but then the word «genes» is crossed out and changed to «jeans», followed by the slogan and logo.
Not even a day after these simple commercials aired, Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle were hit with a barrage of accusations. The actress and the company were accused of racism, Nazism, promotion of eugenics and even that the choice of the actress was determined by her initials (SS), coinciding with the runes SchutzStaffel - Himmler's guard, responsible for the racial policy of the Third Reich. At first, the fire broke out in social networks, but quickly spread to quite respectable media. The fact that the actress is registered as a Republican Party voter in Florida and voted for Donald Trump, whom the harshest critics repeatedly called a «fascist» added fuel to the fire. A White House spokesperson and even the US Vice President felt it necessary to comment on the scandal, which only gave it more momentum. Of course, the number of defenders of Sydney Sweeney was no less than the number of critics and a long and furious discussion in social networks and the press ensured that consumers' attention was focused on American Eagle products, which led to the above-mentioned brilliant financial result.
Was this marketing move a fluke or a subtle calculation? With all due respect to Sydney Sweeney's anatomical characteristics and acting talent, it seems unlikely that she is familiar with the writings of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau or Alfred Rosenberg. The name of the marketer who came up with the idea to play with the consonance «genes» - «jeans» in such an original way is still unknown and it is impossible to judge about his intellectual baggage in the field of genetics and racial theory. But it is worth noting that American Eagle has plenty of commercials starring black models, and the company has not been seen in any projects that contain hints of racial issues.
Accidentally or not, the unnamed (for now) marketer hit the bull's-eye - he was able to «ride» the painful energy of a deep, multi-layered conflict that permeates American society from top to bottom. Yes, it is a racial conflict. Its historical roots stretch back to the very beginning of the exploration of the American continent. This conflict has not cooled down since that distant time; on the contrary, with each manifestation in culture, be it a philosophical treatise, a political slogan, a movie, or a new musical genre, it has become more and more multifaceted, and its presence in the consciousness and subconsciousness of consumers more and more persistent and ramified. This is not a dusty history book; it is today's reality, manifesting itself in extremes such as the BLM movement or the demolition and then rebuilding of monuments to Confederate generals. And if modern cinematography can allow to invite a black man to play the role of a Norwegian konung of the X century, or, even more marvelous - the role of the Finnish Marshal Mannerheim, we should not be surprised by the comments under the Sydney Sweeney videos, which we will not cite here.
So, the use of an objectively existing powerful conflict as a «carrier frequency» modulated by a simple semantic linkage resulted in an impressive promotion of a product that by its very nature does not even have the slightest relation to this conflict! Now let's look at this example in the context of marketing natural diamonds.
Let's start with the price of marketing projects. Here we have a 30-second title video of the «Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans» advertising campaign. It's not a play on the words «genes» and «jeans», it's just a sexy blonde chirping about how American Eagle products make her shape look great. The spartan studio setting - a chair and a mirror all props. If we leave Sydney Sweeney's fee out of brackets (we don't know the details of her contract), we have to admit that the cost of making such a video is a pittance. On the wave of scandal in social networks and the press, the video has gained 5 727 443 views, 57 000 likes and 14 714 comments (at the time of writing this article).
And here's the program video NDC's «Real, Rare, Responsible: Meet Lily James in Botswana». It's longer - 4 minutes and 30 seconds. The concept is similar - a Hollywood celebrity promoting the virtues of a product. But here it is not a naked studio with scanty props, but a full-scale shooting in Botswana, including various scenes with wildlife and diamond mining, which were obviously carried out more than one day. If we leave Lily James' fee out of the equation, the production cost of the NDC video should definitely exceed the production cost of the American Eagle video by several orders of magnitude. The video garnered 4,430,370 views and (attention!) 26 (twenty-five) likes and 1 (one) comment. Which tells us only one thing - the views are scrambled by bots, the audience of the video is almost zero, no one is interested in it.
And now let us remember the sobbing of the NDC management about the lack of funds for marketing and the results of the notorious Luanda Accord. The generic marketing of natural diamonds is so bad because $35 million a year is not enough, we need $100 million? The more money invested in marketing, the more effective it is? Really? Then why the American Eagle commercials, literally made on the knees for a pittance, pushed up the company's capitalization by half a billion in a week, while all the titanic multimillion-dollar projects of the NDC cannot resist the fatal three-year decline in the price of natural diamonds? Of course, it's not about money; marketing costs are by no means proportional to its success. Everything is much simpler and exhaustively described by the famous English aphorism: «A bad workman always blames his tools». There is a Russian analog, and in my opinion it is more suitable for the current situation: «A bad dancer is impeded even by (his own) balls».
All content generated by the NDC in social networks without exception is aimed at removing the slightest signs of conflict from the information shell of natural diamonds and polished diamonds. Natural diamonds are conflict-free, they do good for elephants, African-Americans and just Africans, Aleuts, Inuit, LGBT+ and 5th Avenue residents (underline as appropriate), they emit almost no CO2, and diamond quarries are just earth moving, perhaps even beautifying the planet, etc. And in general, there is almost no evil in the world, except for the pesky LGD producers who prevent natural diamond producers from doing good solely because of their squabbling nature. That is the whole marketing paradigm of the NDC, its effectiveness is obviously close to zero, regardless of the amount of investment. Because it is thirty years late and in today's world, full of sharply escalating conflicts and media aggression, it looks like an absolute anachronism.
What social and age group of the U.S. population (the world's largest diamond market) should be the primary object of marketing influence today? The middle class of Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012). Are Zoomers interested in the problems of elephants in Botswana, the welfare of Africans and Inuit, whose lands are used for diamond mining? Judging by the reaction in social networks to the NDC videos, absolutely not. But Sydney Sweeney, a vivid representative of the zoomer generation, and the American Eagle brand, designed specifically for zoomers, have convincingly shown that this generation is interested in conflicts, and that conflicts, unfortunately, are the breeding ground for the ideas of successful marketers.
And if the sales of jeans, historically a completely non-conflict product, give such a response to marketing done in the "conflict" paradigm, then the marketing potential of natural diamonds and polished diamonds, whose entire history is a whole range of fantastically interesting conflicts, simply cannot be overestimated. It is on this, and only on this path that lies the key to separating the markets of natural diamonds and LGDs, to turning the former into a historically authenticated original and the latter into an endlessly replicated copy.
It is clear that Fukuyama's «end of history» is only a problem of Fukuyama himself and his gullible followers. The wonderful wonderful world of tolerance, i.e. indifference and hypocrisy, has given rise to an old and unkind energy that is now a driving force in politics, economics and even domestic consumption. In all likelihood no one else can ignore it. And the adventures of Sydney Sweeney may well be seen as obvious proof of that.
Sergey Goryainov is an independent journalist, who writes on topics related to the diamond industry. He is an author of several books and over 200 publications in specialized press. From 2000 to 2006, he was a member of the ALROSA Information Policy Council. Sergey is currently working on a book about the operations of the Third Reich and Stalin's USSR in the diamond market. This article reflects solely his personal opinion.
Main Image: ""American Eagle"-Kampagne mit Sydney Sweeney." by Heute.at is licensed under CC BY 4.0