Controversy over American Eagle’s new Sydney Sweeney campaign is dominating headlines, but social media posts about the campaign have been mostly positive, according to data provided exclusively to Retail Brew from PeakMetrics.

From the launch of the campaign on July 23 through August 1, 63.7% of posts that mentioned American Eagle across TikTok and X combined were favorable, while 29.4% were unfavorable and 6.9% were neutral.

Molly Dwyer, director of insights at PeakMetrics, told Retail Brew that she found the results “slightly surprising,” but not inexplicable, considering the way the campaign has found more voluble defendants on the right than critics elsewhere.

Critics of the campaign, “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” objected to the double-meaning of the actor having great genes in the genetic sense, with some seeing eugenic undertones.

As recently as July 28, favorable and unfavorable mentions about American Eagle on the platforms were “roughly even,” Dwyer said, adding that shifted when “the right-wing media ecosystem got a hold of this.”

The New York Post dismissed critics of the campaign as a “crazed woke mob,” a sentiment echoed in numerous segments on Fox News. Then conservative politicians, including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Senator Ted Cruz, spoke out in defense of American Eagle, but no comparable cadre of high-profile Democrats raised objections to the campaign.

“Basically the favorable [to the campaign] side kept up the volume,” Dwyer said. “They kept their foot on the gas, drawing this into the Fox News discourse, drawing this into the White House discourse, and there is nobody on the anti-American Eagle side” who is as impactfully “keeping this conversation going.”

In other words, the backlash was trumped (and Trumped) by the backlash to the backlash.

Keep reading here.—AAN

Retail media went from being the awkward wallflower at the marketing party in 2019 (just 10% of total media spend) to tripling its way to nearly 30% of overall media budgets in 2024, the latest data from Keen Decision Systems—a SaaS platform that enables enterprise companies to predict, optimize, and measure their marketing spend—shows. The big takeaway is retail media’s appeal lies in its effectiveness and certainty to drive sales.

In some ways, it’s the same story, because Amazon still takes the top spot. However, rivals are crashing the party and brands are now smart enough not to put all their eggs in one basket. Brands are spending more display ad dollars at Walmart, Target, and Instacart, Keen shared in its findings.

Keep reading here.—VC

They say two things can be true at once, and that seems to be the case when it comes to American shoppers’ spending habits and current consumer sentiment that most retailers could only call cautious.

A new survey by Optimum Retailing suggests that when it comes to discretionary spending, Americans are not letting up.

• In fact, 72% of shoppers said they had made an unplanned in-store discretionary purchase in the past month.

The report, titled “US Consumer Spending Habits: Insights for Retailers for 2026,” which polled 1,000 adult US consumers, also found that while 34% of consumers planned on cutting down on their discretionary spending in the next six months, there were some retail categories or events that made it hard to not to spend.

• These include limited-time sales or promotions (55%), “attention-grabbing” product displays (45%), and the ability to get the product instantly (26%).
• Moreover, only about 5% of those surveyed said in-store shopping just didn’t feel worthy anymore.

This doesn’t mean consumers aren’t genuinely trying. About 46% of shoppers believed they had actually managed to adhere to a “discretionary budget.” And for those evidently determined to continue to stick to a budget, there were categories they were willing to make sacrifices in.

Keep reading here.—JS