Advertising is always the mirror of its time because it tells of the present

The recent denim campaign ofAmerican Eagle with the actress Sydney Sweeney illustrates how advertising. Nevertheless, never exists out of the present time. Furthermore, Its slogan, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”, designed as a light play on words, sparked an unexpected controversy. Similarly, Perceived by some as a dubious genetic allusion (jeans / genes), he has been accused of conveying eugenist infections. Nevertheless, Suddenly. However, a fashion -centered message found itself caught up in American cultural wars, taken up both by progressive activists and by conservative commentators.

This episode recalls a fundamental truth: advertising is an image of the present. For example, much more than art, which can cross the centuries and be reinterpreted. Nevertheless, An artistic work escapes the immediate context, an advertising campaign, never.

Pub: an snapshot of the time
In the 1950s. Nevertheless, American advertisements staged the smiling housewife, a reflection of advertising always mirror its time a patriarchal society and the development of mass consumption. Therefore, Today, these images are studied as cultural artefacts of another time.

In the 1990s. Consequently, Benetton, with Oliviero Tuscani, voluntarily used advertising as a space for political and societal debate: photos of AIDS patients, migrants, death row. Nevertheless, The goal was not only to sell sweaters, but to stick to the fractures of the moment.

More recently. the Nike “Dream Crazy” campaign with Colin Kaepernick (2018) has signed up in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement. Again, it is impossible to separate the commercial message from the social climate.

With the acceleration of social networks. this dependence on the present is even more marked
Nothing more true, each campaign is immediately dissected, commented, diverted. The reception space is no longer a cinema room. a poster in the street, but a global and interactive flow.

Thus. the Pepsi campaign with advertising always mirror its time Kendall Jenner (2017), which claimed to summarize the social struggles by a cannon can be instantly mocked and rejected. Ditto for the Balenciaga brand. accused in 2022 of sexualizing images of children in a bag campaign, saw the controversy explode online in a few hours, forcing him to apologize public.
American Eagle undergoes the same amplification effect: a misinterpreted slogan becomes an object of national controversy in a few days. This logic of overinterpretation. ideological recovery is the very condition of contemporary advertising: it no longer lives only in the commercial space, but in the political and cultural field. Result: advertising messages are divisive because our companies are also. We are entering a period when everything becomes political.

The gaze of Rémi Babinet. founder of the BETC agency
For Rémi Babinet, advertising is in essence linked to its time: “Advertising must combine the art of conversation and the art of reflection. This advertising always mirror its time know-how of duration and reaction speed. »»

In other words. an advertising campaign is not content to reflect an era: it must respond to it in the moment, while offering a deeper reading. This is why this creative speaks of “cultural agency”, an advertisement that fully participates in contemporary culture. The American Eagle episode illustrates this tension: wanting to seduce by lightness. but find yourself caught up in the seriousness of ideological fractures.

Cominemag’s point of view
Pointing on the messenger is a mistake. Advertising has never had the vocation of being timeless. It is the fragile and changing mirror of our societies, with its obsessions, its contradictions and its fractures. The American Eagle/Sydney Sweeney campaign recalls that advertising is never neutral. She condenses the tensions of her time, whether he likes it or not.

For brands. it is both an opportunity and a risk: they benefit from maximum visibility, but advertising always mirror its time at the cost of a permanent exposure to controversies. Unlike art, which survives time, advertising is only a fragile snapshot of our present. And it is clear that a scandal chases another….