Diversity Marketing Is Working

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Diversity marketing works, and Gap has the sales line to prove it.

In August 2025 Gap put out an ad called “Better in Denim.” Six women from KATSEYE, dancing to a remix of Kelis’s “Milkshake,” directed by Bethany Vargas, choreographed by Robbie Blue. No dialogue worth quoting, no tagline anyone repeats. Just the dancing and the jeans.

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It did 8 billion media impressions and over 500 million views. CEO Richard Dickson said it pulled more views in its first three days than Gap’s four previous campaigns combined. Denim grew double digits. Gap brand comparable sales came in at +7% the quarter after launch, more than double what analysts had penciled in. KATSEYE picked up two Webbys for it in May.

Coming out at around the same time, the ad it kept getting compared to was American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” It leaned on the “jeans”-“genes” pun with a blonde, blue-eyed lead, and the internet did what the internet does. Between that and the Travis Kelce work, AE cleared 44 billion impressions. The stock jumped around 34% on the noise.

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Then the quarter closed and comps came in at +1%, short of the 2.1% analysts expected. The real strength that quarter was Aerie at +11%, which is the intimates and activewear business, not the denim the ad was selling. So AE won the impressions and lost the register. Gap won a fraction of the reach and converted it.

One correction before anyone gets carried away with the clapback story. Gap and its agency have both said “Better in Denim” was shot in early July, weeks before the Sweeney spot aired. Gap wasn’t answering anybody, it already knew who it was talking to, and that’s the more useful version of the story. A fast reflex is luck. A point of view is something you can plan.

The KATSEYE ad also gets treated like lightning striking once. Gap has been running this same play since 2024, when it built its spring linen campaign around Jungle’s “Back on 74,” with Tyla and Shay Latukolan’s choreography, directed by the band themselves.

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That song was already sitting on more than a billion views across TikTok, most of it people learning the routine in their bedrooms. Gap didn’t invent the moment. It found one that was already running and bought a seat on it, then let a room full of dancers of every size and shade carry the clothes. Same instinct, eighteen months before KATSEYE.

And they’ve done it again this month. “Denim on your own,” out August 11, with Malcolm Todd and Inde Navarrette, Todd singing his own version of Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” directed by Tanu Muiño.

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Calvin Leung has creative-directed all of this: the music, movement, and a cast that looks like an actual crowd. Three campaigns, one idea, held long enough to become a brand property. Calling the KATSEYE ad viral gives Gap none of the credit for the two years of work that made it likely.

Read the casting as a quota filled well and you’d have it wrong.

KATSEYE came out of a worldwide audition Hybe and Geffen ran through 120,000 applicants, twenty finalists training in LA for a year, six left standing on a Netflix show. What came out the other end is a Filipina, a Swiss, an Indian-American, a Korean, an American who is part Chinese-Singaporean, and an American of Cuban and Venezuelan descent. That group was engineered to be recognizable in more than one country at once, and a brand borrowing it inherits the same property.

That is the commercial argument, and it’s a boring one: a cast that reads as global travels further per dollar than a cast that reads as one town. Gap spent less and reached enough of the right people to move denim. AE spent its reach on an argument.

There’s a risk argument too. A single polarizing face is a concentrated bet, and AE found out what the downside looks like. Half the industry has quietly reached the same conclusion. Guess made Hyunjin of Stray Kids its first global ambassador. Calvin Klein has run Jennie and Jung Kook alongside Kendall Jenner. Levi’s signed Alia Bhatt with India named out loud as the reason, then put Rosé on a Super Bowl. Nobody is doing this for a diversity report. They’re doing it because a global face is cheaper reach and lower blast radius.

Gap is an American business. Around 88% of its net sales come from the US, out of $15.4 billion for the fiscal year, and roughly 82% of its 79,000 people are US-based. It does not need Manila to buy jeans.

It does need Manila to make the ad move. Attention is global even when the cash register isn’t, and the 500 million views that made Gap’s quarter were never going to come from the US alone. Sophia Laforteza is Filipino, daughter of the Manila theater actress Carla Guevara-Laforteza, and that ad landed here the same week it landed there, on the same phones, in the same feed.

I’m a Filipino, in the Philippines, writing about jeans sold in America. Fine. But the US doesn’t get to make culture in a sealed room. Whatever it decides, brilliant or stupid, the rest of us are already living inside it, so we get to have an opinion on the output.

Gap made an ad people wanted to copy. American Eagle made one people wanted to argue about. Only one of those turned up in the denim line.

Props to Gap, and to Leung’s team, for holding a point of view across three years of campaigns while the category chased noise. Being in tune with the pulse of the world is the baseline requirement for any brand person. A resonating creative, a unique POV, being in touch with the zeitgeist: those are global.