For those who charged that Sydney Sweeney’s nude appearance on behalf of Novig was little more than a stereotype-affirming flesh play, here’s a piece of news: It wasn’t a male, midlife-crisis executive dreaming up those shots—it was Sweeney.
“I’ve been a part of the creative conversations from the very beginning,” the 29-year-old told Complex. “I had built an amazing relationship with everyone involved, and I was really excited to get to set.”
In most other cases, however, that’s not the case.
When an ad campaign starring female endorsers tanks with the public, it’s often the women who get blamed, whether or not they played a role in creating the ads. Even when the public ire centers on the brand itself, the women on camera rarely escape unscathed.
Here are four examples of how that’s happened.
The song that hit Mary J. Blige hard
In 2012, Burger King signed Mary J. Blige to rework her hit song “Don’t Mind” to tout the chain’s new wraps, and Ms. Blige obliged. But when the spot that aired featured the“Queen of Hip Hop Soul” singing the praises of crispy chicken, fans reacted with horror and anger—much of it directed at the singer-songwriter. Accused of acquiescing to an ugly racial stereotype, Blige struggled to explain that the concept she’d agreed to was different from the one consumers wound up seeing. (Burger King later admitted that the ad that aired was “not final.”) Even 12 years later, Blige still feels the sting. “Everybody dropped the ball, and I’m holding everything,” Blige recently told podcaster Scott Evans. “I was getting clobbered for no fucking reason.”
Kendall Jenner wishes she’d stayed home
In what could be the most tone-deaf ad of the 21st century, Pepsi cast 21-year-old Kendall Jenner in a 2017 ad titled “Live for Now.” If capturing the zeitgeist of the Black Lives Matter movement was a dumb move for a soft-drink company, worse still was the decision to cast Jenner—who solved America’s racial unrest by handing a can of soda to a cop. Though Pepsi took the brunt of the criticism (later admitting “we missed the mark”), Jenner was in for it, too. Some accused her of expropriating Leishia Evans, a real-life protestor tackled by three policemen in riot gear during a 2016 demonstration. But Jenner reportedly knew little about the production she’d signed to do. “If I knew this would’ve been the outcome,” she said later, “I never would’ve done something like this.”
Brooke Shields was a naive teen
Way back in 1980, Brooke Shields made cultural history when, at age 15, she began appearing in ads for Calvin Klein jeans. Her signature line: “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” Was it suggestive? Sure. Did Shields have a hand in creating it? Hardly. This marketing vision belonged to Klein and famous photographer Richard Avedon. But that didn’t stop America from “screaming at me and screaming at my mother” for creating the sexual innuendo, Shields told Vogue in 2021. “I was naive—I didn’t think anything of it,” she said. “The assumption is that I was much more savvy than I ever really was.”
