Sponsored by RockWater

Sydney Sweeney seemed to come out of nowhere.

Euphoria on HBO was a popular show, but when episodes peaked at 6m viewers, that doesn’t feel like enough to make her a culture icon.

But her social media tells a different story, where she’s clocking more than a million likes per post on her Instagram with 25m followers, and 70% of them are female.

She’s very much a ‘dream girl’ who can sell Dr. Squatch Bathwater Soap, but with a huge aspirational female audience.

In other words, she’s really, really valuable.

I’ll break down what really happened in her American Eagle denim campaign and what can be learned from it, and it’s not, as so many have said, simply: “Get Sydney Sweeney in your next campaign!”

Also in this edition:

• Be Whoopi Goldberg from Sister Act

• Why Stephen Colbert Should Go To YouTube

• The Cookie Opt-In Evolution

• BeReal’s Comeback Plans

• Job ops from Ritual, Tinder, and Insta360.

• …and a dank creator economy meme by yours truly!

Let’s get into it.

NEWS:

Brands are Sweet on Sweeney

Every marketer on LinkedIn is talking about Sydney Sweeney.

Yes, her denim ad dropped and the stock prices spiked.

Yes, she’s possibly the biggest Gen Z star on the planet.

Yes, she’s got that rare ‘every girl wants to be her and every boy wants to be with her’ vibe that plays so well in ads.

But there’s so much to this AEO ad campaign that people have missed. Time to shed some light:

The stock market is more vibes than data. It didn’t used to be this way. At least that’s what I’ve heard from my Wall Street friends. The bet for traders is not necessarily how well the company will perform, but will other traders also buy, inflate the price, then give them the opportunity to sell before it goes down. It’s why Toyota does three times the revenue of Tesla but trades for a little more than half of the value.

Wall Street Bets is Back! After this ad dropped, Wall Street Bets, the Reddit forum popular for the Game Stop stock scandal or revolution (depending on whether you made or lost money) jumped into the fray on this one. We don’t actually know how much of this is Sydney Sweeney and how much is the incredible power of retail investors that have proven gains far beyond this one in the past.

The ads and products were right for her demo. This wasn’t Clooney’s Casamigos tequila. This is an everyday essential at a reasonably priced store that’s in every mall in America with a simple purchasing website. These jeans are going for 40 bucks. This is exactly the way to match a celebrity with such a big audience and so much heat. Don’t make it too exclusive. Her audience is young and trying to be the ‘it’ girl of their high school.

This is a story about aspirational influence in general, not one actress. Sydney is awesome. She’s got a huge following. But, just like most stars, you can’t just put her face on something and have it succeed. Her images on American Eagle’s Instagram are almost all under 10,000 likes. The collection is not sold out. This story is about content, distribution, audience, and PR working harmoniously, and that can happen with any brand that can find the right balance. And I’m willing to wager I could find you ten OOTD creators that can sell more per impression than Sweeney at a far more efficient spend.

I’m by no means dunking on Sydney Sweeney.

But I see this as just another influencer marketing campaign executed well, with a few fun anomalies at play.

The right lesson to take away from all of this: influencer marketing works when it’s done right.

SPONSORED BY ROCKWATER

Have you thought about selling your creator business?

RockWater advises owners in the creator economy on the sale of their business. We have the largest buyer network, and negotiate the best deals possible for our clients. We’re proud to be the industry’s top M&A advisor.

We recently advised Lionize, an influencer marketing platform, on their sale to gen.video. We’ve also advised Long Haul Mgmt (sold to Wasserman), Bottle Rocket Mgmt (sold to Night), Bounty (sold to gen.video), and have many more deals yet to be announced.

If you want a POV on your company’s valuation and readiness for a sale, reach out to to [email protected] to setup an intro call.

GROW 1%:

Phil Ranta’s weekly social media growth newsletter with one actionable tip to grow.

This week’s ‘Grow 1%’ is titled Be Whoopi Goldberg from Sister Act and discusses how to stand out in the crowd of social media.

Here’s an excerpt, and you can read the entire edition in the link above:

In the Oscar-considered opus Sister Act was released in 1992, Whoopi Goldberg as Delores, the bar singer who became a nun through the witness protection program, said the following when encouraging her fellow nun to sing more loudly:

"Okay, try this. Close your eyes. Visualize yourself in room full of people, lots of silverware, people talking loud, dropping stuff, drunks, women with trays going 'whadda ya gonna have?'. Your voice has to carry across the din, you have to get up over all of that to be heard in the back of the room where I'm sitting, listening, straining to hear you. Okay? Keep that in your mind while we do this." The social media world is noisy.

It's a room full of people talking loudly.

Screaming.

And unless it's your dream to be a professional edgelord, you're not going to win by screaming louder.

You have to demand attention in another way.

So how do you do that without spreading conspiracy theories or sending sick burns to celebrities?

My favorite strategy: say something viscerally specific.

Continue reading here.

FAME & FORTUNE:

The Late Show host Stephen Colbert is out at CBS next year with reasons spanning from ‘too expensive’ to ‘getting the Skydance acquisition cleared by the FCC by taking out a Trump enemy.’ Either way, the LinkedIn creator economy has been buzzing about his potential on YouTube, where his videos regularly outperform Kimmel and Fallon despite their earlier time slots.

We’ve all been opting into cookies on websites for a few years now, but I’ve seen little innovation in how those legally-necessary modules function. Last week I met with System1 where they created technology that is legally compliant and helps website and platform owners gather more valuable insights into their visitors. If you reach out, please tell them I sent you or let me know if you want to be connected!

BeReal has been quiet lately. After explosive growth in 2022 for their ‘capture real life’ photo sharing platform with a peak valuation at $600m with a half a billion Euro acquisition by Voodoo in 2024, they have been losing users and, more importantly, mindshare in the industry. Now they’re announcing big changes to capture Gen Z including highly local recommendations and an expansion of their ad platform.

I swear this is the last time, says Trump’s team of the TikTok ban extensions. Now that all signs are pointing to TikTok creating a separate U.S. app for a potential sale, the president’s team has been clear that if a deal is not done by September 17 the app will go dark. And as we all know, their word is their bond (*cough cough*)

INDUSTRY HIRING:

Ritual needs an Influencer Associate but in the interview you have to prove you can swallow three daily vitamins without water.

Tinder is looking for an Influencer Marketing Manager who understands trends on social platforms, obsesses about bottom-of-funnel conversions, and likes long walks on the beach.

Insta360 wants a Partnerships Manager who is so paranoid that they always need a camera to see behind their back.

MEME ZONE:

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this edition, give it a share and if you get someone to sign up, I’ll send you my ‘10 Rep-Friendly Ways to Monetize Today!’ deck!

Until next time, protect yo rep.