American Eagle on Wednesday began rolling out its campaign for the crucial back-to-school season, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The effort will span social programming, experiential activations and brand advertising, including a 30-second ad running on YouTube and paid social. Overall, the marketing will focus on culture around malls, campus life and sports.
The sports angle is particularly well-timed: Lamine Yamal, the Spanish soccer star who signed a five-year global ambassador deal with the brand in January, just helped his national team to World Cup gold on Sunday. The 19-year-old phenom kicked off his first campaign with the brand last month, and will now have an even bigger role in the back-to-school push.
“I'm not saying this as a CMO who sometimes can be over dramatic: This is the most exciting talent partnership in our future, and we just can't believe that all the stars aligned, and everything that we dreamed of is coming true in real time,” American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers told Marketing Dive. “It’s reflective of what happens in modern marketing today: best laid plans, then something exciting happens, then you pivot and try to take full advantage of it.”
American Eagle quickly worked to celebrate Yamal after Spain’s World Cup win, temporarily changing its name to Lamine’s Eagles and declaring its Instagram page “a Lamine Yamal fan account.” The brand also rolled out social ads featuring Yamal and soccer balls that give a CGI spin to ads that recently ran on Times Square billboards.
“This American Eagle marketing team is working around the clock to make sure that we are amplifying Lamine into this back-to-school season,” Brommer said. “The team is not done coming up with some new tricks and surprises as we build into a product collaboration launch closer to the Labor Day weekend.”
American Eagle seems to have a knack for finding the right celebrity partners at the right time. The brand last year memorably teamed with actor Sydney Sweeney for a campaign that, while controversial, helped attract new customers and briefly reversed a negative sales trend. American Eagle in February launched a campaign with Ella Langley, the country singer whose song “Choosin’ Texas” just notched a 14th week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Both Sweeney and Langley will feature in the back-to-school effort.
“I never feel like talent should define a brand, but the right talent can certainly amplify a brand,” Brommers said.
Gen Z returns to the mall and campus
Along with its heavyweight brand partners, American Eagle will focus on engaging Gen Z in other arenas as part of its back-to-school campaign, chief among them the mall. The cohort's share of foot traffic at malls increased 57% year over year, according to PwC data cited by the brand — a behavior change that also informed a recent effort by American Eagle competitor Aéropostale.
“We are back to basically pre-pandemic mall traffic… and that mall traffic is being driven by young people that want to be back in real life, making real connections with real people. We will have more in-mall activations this season than at any time of my CMO tenure over the last five years,” Brommer said.
To tap into Gen Z’s return to the mall, American Eagle will roll out in-store events, discount days, store-exclusive denim drops and more. Customers who try on jeans in store and scan a QR code during the first week of August will have a chance to win jeans for life, and the brand will encourage its creator community to head to their local store for product discovery and content creation.
“When someone takes the time and effort to get in their car, pay those gas prices, park and go into a mall, it isn't a transaction anymore. They want an experience,” Brommers said. “This is now as important as thinking about your creative campaign or your media strategy. It's now plotting out how you can engage with Gen Z in real time, in real life.”
To bridge the physical-digital divide, American Eagle will launch a social-first, influencer-led content series called “Mall Diaries” that attempts to capture the spontaneity and social connection of the mall, with a dose of Y2K nostalgia that has proven to be an effective tactic for engaging Gen Z consumers.
Beyond the mall, the brand in August will head to college campuses, focusing on sorority chapters at schools including the University of Alabama, Arizona State University, the University of Florida and Ohio State University. The influencer-led partnerships will feature product displays, giveaways and room makeover content as the brand seeks to tap into #RushTok, the social media trend around sorority recruitment.
“RushTok is not just about the young women that are going through sorority recruitment. It really is about people watching — almost in real time — the outfits, the drama and the excitement of sorority recruitment,” Brommer said of the trend.
All together, American Eagle’s back-to-school marketing seeks to help the brand break through during a season when spending is expected to remain flat, according to Deloitte’s latest Back-to-School Survey. Planned spending is expected to peak in late July and early August in a return to pre-pandemic trends, per the report.
“It's a long back-to-school season now. It's not just the first two or three weeks and the shopping is done. Kids go back to campus, they look around at what everyone's wearing, and then they go back to the mall to buy some more stuff, and then the weather changes,” Brommers explained. “We're really set up to take advantage of a 10-week sprint of back-to-school this year.”
