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The media and cultural landscape is changing at an unprecedented rate, but human nature works to a different timescale.

In the news this week: the UK’s new second-favourite TV channel is no longer a TV channel. And meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a jeans company has caused shock and outrage, and added big bucks to its share value, by launching advertising showing an attractive young woman wearing its products.

Let’s start with the TV first. Or the not-quite-TV. In July this year, a report by the British media regulator Ofcom revealed that video-sharing platform YouTube has now overtaken commercial broadcaster ITV as the second-most popular ‘channel’ watched on the nation’s TV sets. Note that last part: we’re not talking about people scrolling on their phones and tablets: we’re talking about people increasingly watching not-television on their televisions. And we’re talking all generations here – not just the young. It turns out that even the over-55s have doubled their viewing of YouTube in just 12 months.

Yet at the same time, what they’re actually watching when they view this content is becoming more and more like actual TV programming. According to the BBC, half of the platform’s top-trending videos now more closely resemble traditional TV, including long-form interviews and game shows, positioning it as a direct competitor to ad-supported TV services. The TV channels, meanwhile, are returning the favour. If you watch YouTube to get tips on cooking, or crafts, or DIY, for example, the big broadcasters have all the sewing bees and bake-offs and pottery throw-downs you can eat.

The new comes along, but the old persists. It’s how we roll.

There are times when it looks as though everything is going to be upended. But in the end, what we end up with, more often than not, is an accommodation. A mash-up. A pick-and-mix.

And so to advertising.

Five years ago, something got into us. Maybe it was the pent-up fear and uncertainty of the first waves of Covid. Maybe it was lockdown sending us all a little stir-crazy. Maybe it was the disruption of decades of previously-unquestioned assumptions and routines. Whatever it was, stuff happened, and stuff changed.

We saw upheaval spread through cities around the world. We saw statues toppled in the civic squares. In corporate culture and in marketing we saw the rise of a new morality and a new sense of purpose. It was no longer enough just to sell products: you had to solve climate change at the same time. Or you had to promote social justice. Or you had to increase inclusion. Or whatever. All those things are good, of course. But along the way too many people lost sight of the basic economics of things. Too many people forgot about the importance of giving people what they pay for. In the rush to be more worthy and more purposeful than their rivals, brands like Gillette and Bud Light ended up alienating actual customers and crashing their share value.

So it’s sort of interesting to see the pendulum swinging the other way, in the form of the new campaign for American Eagle jeans, featuring actress Sydney Sweeney.

If you’re a Brit like me, then you should be aware, before you say anything, that in America, Sydney is considered to be a woman’s name. Robin is, too, despite Batman And. But Lionel isn’t, even despite American novelist Lionel Shriver. Don’t ask me why.

American Eagle has signed up Sydney Sweeney to do what Levi’s did with Nick Kamen and Brad Pitt, and what Guess Jeans did with Claudia Schiffer, several decades ago: which is to look sexy wearing the product. But 2025 not being 1985, it has caused an absolute furore online. The endline doesn’t help: Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans has been criticised for promoting racism and eugenics. Because jeans sounds like genes. Or as one commentator on X put it, “Maybe I’m too f***ing woke. But getting a blue-eyed, blonde, white woman and focusing your campaign around her having perfect genetics feels weird.”

But either way, the jeans have been flying off the shelves, and, in a sort of inverse Dylan Mulvaney effect, American Eagle’s stock is soaring.

It’s at times like this that I’m reminded of the only line anyone ever quotes from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, even if they haven’t actually read it.

Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.

It’s a good sentence. It’s also a lesson well worth remembering. It’s true for brands, it’s true for marketers, and it’s true for everyone else. Both parts of it matter. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the ‘everything must change’ part, if you’re that way inclined. Or, if you’re of the other persuasion, in the ‘stay the same’ part.

Yet, marketing has to take account of both. It must adapt to the changing world we live in. And yet, at the same time, it can never afford to forget the remarkable constancy of the human nature that underlies it.

First published in WARC August 2025