First it was American Eagle and Sidney Sweeney. Now? Dunkin’ Donuts.
Yep, you read that right. The company known for cranking out glazed carb bombs decided to cannonball straight into the culture wars with its latest ad campaign — and it’s not subtle. As Twitchy spotted, Dunkin’ is taking a page right out of the Sweeney playbook: put attractive people front and center, ditch the woke sermons, and rile up the usual suspects for maximum buzz.
And, of course, the media reaction is the same: “They learned nothing!” Wrong. They learned everything.
Legit dumbest controversy ever https://t.co/HeP6XSs5jj
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) July 28, 2025
The Sidney Sweeney jeans campaign proved something advertisers forgot during the Bud Light era: Normal people are normal. They like normal ads. They don’t want to be scolded about gender theory when they’re trying to buy pants or a latte. They prefer attractive, relatable people selling them stuff over being guilt-tripped about social justice. And when you give them that? They respond. Enthusiastically.
That’s exactly what’s happening here. Dunkin’ isn’t marketing to the tiny slice of the population obsessed with policing every ad for ideological compliance. They’re marketing to the vast Normal People demographic — the people who don’t live on Twitter, who don’t boycott a coffee shop because it didn’t fly a flag for their niche cause, and who just want to enjoy a drink without being force-fed politics.
This is the post-Bud Light advertising era. Alissa Heinerscheid’s disaster taught Madison Avenue a painful lesson: Woke scolds are loud, but they don’t buy enough product to keep you in business. Normal people do. That’s why Target quietly shelved its Satanist-designed tuck-friendly swimwear push. That’s why even Hollywood, slowly but surely, has started dialing back the lectures in its big commercial films.
90% of this fake outrage news cycle is liberal media outlets seeing an opportunity to use Sydney Sweeney cleavage pics to drive clicks to their articles https://t.co/ThjKVZdsfE
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) July 31, 2025
And Dunkin’? They’re having fun with it. They know a little provocation generates buzz. They know Lefty outrage is free advertising. They know the “Queering” of every brand and product isn’t some unstoppable cultural freight train — and they’re cashing in by proving it.
Will this Normal People strategy stop being controversial? Probably. But the message is clear: the age of marketing by scolding is over. Companies are figuring out that pleasing the Normal People demo is a lot more profitable than appeasing the Twitter mobs.
