Good morning. Today, Jay Schottenstein gives his first interview on the “Great Jeans” ad campaign (and those claims of eugenics); the new version of Sora will generate videos featuring copyrighted material; and Taylor Swift’s Easter-egg marketing strategy enables a Super let-down for fans.

American Eagle’s CEO had a message for staff when a Sydney Sweeney ad campaign blew up the internet, Suzanne Kapner writes: Hold tight.

He instructed executives to stay calm and directed employees not to comment on the ads, which were being praised by some and called sexist or racist by others. He put a small team in charge of monitoring social media and hired a firm to poll customers. The company didn’t pull any of the ads.

“You can’t run from fear,” Jay Schottenstein, the billionaire chief executive of American Eagle, said in his first interview on the subject. “We stand behind what we did.”

On the “Great Jeans” critique: Schottenstein, an Orthodox Jew, was perplexed at the criticism that the campaign’s pun on “great genes,” with Sweeney as the exemplar, smacked of eugenics. He said his mother-in-law grew up in Nazi Germany and watched as the synagogue across the street from her home was burned to the ground.

“I’m very conscious of that term,” Schottenstein said. If he and his team had felt the ads were offensive in that way, he said, “we never would’ve done it.”

OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator that creates videos featuring copyrighted material unless rights holders opt out, Keach Hagey, Berber Jin and Ben Fritz report.

OpenAI doesn’t plan to accept a blanket opt-out across all of an artist or studio’s work. It sent some talent agencies a link to report violations.

People familiar with OpenAI policies said any new video generator would have similar copyright guardrails to ChatGPT’s image generator tool, which was released in April and promptly flooded the internet with memes in the style of the Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli.

“Given the intense competition in the space, I think they think, ‘maybe we will ask for forgiveness instead of asking for permission,’” said Kristelia García, a communications, entertainment and media professor at Georgetown Law School.

More news that Hollywood doesn’t want to hear: President Trump revived his promise to slap a 100% tariff on films made outside the U.S. Some in Hollywood worry about the impact on domestic features that shoot abroad, like Disney’s next “Avengers” movies, as well as the chance of retaliatory tariffs in important international markets. [WSJ] 

The NFL’s announcement that Bad Bunny will play the Super Bowl halftime show this February hit Swifties like an earthquake, Elias Leight writes.

Taylor Swift has long engaged and excited fans by hiding clues about her upcoming events in songs, appearances and social-media posts.

But that strategy has also made Swifties prone to cooking up lots of ultimately erroneous theories—including when they firmly decided Swift had teased a Super Bowl gig by mentioning the number “47” a couple of times on the Kelce brothers’ podcast.

She thanked Jason Kelce for giving her a breathless 47-second introduction, and she joked that she had played “47,000” locations on the Eras Tour.

Fans noted that the 47th show on that tour took place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.... the same stadium that will soon host the Super Bowl.

“It’s crazy and silly,” said Ana Szabo, who co-hosts a Swift fan podcast, “but those are the types of Easter eggs that she’s done in the past.”

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Developers are pitching member clubs for a growing affluent class in smaller cities like Jacksonville, Fla., and Lexington, Ky. [WSJ]

Cosmetics giant Coty will consider a sale or spinoff of CoverGirl and its other mass-market beauty brands. [WSJ] 

ChatGPT is letting users buy goods from Etsy and some Shopify merchants without leaving the platform. [WSJ]

Burger King wants families to forget its dude-centric “Creepy King” marketing era. [Restaurant Business]

Pret A Manger hired Restaurant Brands International executive Matthew Bresnahan to be its new chief marketing officer. [QSR] 

Qdoba promoted marketing executive Jon Burke to chief marketing officer. [Fast Casual]

Vail Resorts said fewer season passes were sold ahead of the upcoming ski season after it failed to keep pace with shifting consumer behavior. [WSJ] 

Maxwell House is going by “Maxwell Apartment” for a promotion centered on value. [Fast Company] 

Reebok continues to mine consumer nostalgia with Sony Playstation sneakers timed to the console’s 30th anniversary. [Sneaker News]

Disney and 20th Century Fox announced a sequel to “The Simpsons Movie.” [Variety]