Digested week: Smirking Gwyneth Paltrow turns Coldplay kiss-cam scandal into a marketing win

The Guardian

5 days ago

She is an actor, a businesswoman, a guru and an influencer, but at heart – let's be honest – Gwyneth Paltrow is a sales guy, who has shown us time and again via Goop how thoroughly she understands how to monetise sneering. This week, crisis PR-style, she lent her world-class expertise to Astronomer, the company that dragged everyone's eyes up to the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert two weeks ago when two of its married executives were entwined where they shouldn't have been.
In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, during which the male half of the pair resigned, a widely asked question was: could the mass public shaming of two executives from a company no one had heard of – 'a niche tech startup with roughly 300 employees', as the New York Times put it – be considered a net win or a loss for Astronomer? It was a tough one to judge. On the one hand, all publicity is good publicity. On the other, is being known as the company that brought us two pilloried presumed adulterers necessarily a recommendation for its data and AI services?
Enter Paltrow, with her instinctive ability to ride waves of popular sentiment – and former marriage to the lead singer of Coldplay – appearing in a video released by Astronomer's social media team. 'Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days and they wanted me to answer the most common ones,' said Paltrow, looking straight to camera with that slight smirk she always wears that seems to say 'members of my family happen to find me very amusing'. A series of questions then appears on screen, including 'OMG! What the actual f-.' To which Paltrow replies: 'Yes! 'Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.' And so on.
It works because it's a knowing, clever spin that owns the outrage – and it's a big win for Astronomer, whose average of 150 likes on its social media posts jumped to 64,000 with Paltrow's video. It may even help rehabilitate the pair involved. Of course, the biggest win was for Paltrow and the impression she gave, brilliantly managed, of being a thoroughly and relatably good egg.
Into the same midsummer vacuum where news might otherwise appear, bursts this: Sydney Sweeney discourse! Quick recap: Sweeney, star of White Lotus and the romcom Anyone But You, has appeared in an advert for American Eagle, a slightly creaky US leisurewear brand that like so many mid-range brands from the 90s – Urban Outfitters, Eddie Bauer, even good old Banana Republic – has been suffering from a lack of relevance. The campaign, in which Sweeney lounges in double denim, would seem to be doing what advertising should, which is to get people talking about it, although possibly not in the same sentence as 'eugenics'.
It seems like a stretch but the tagline 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans' – a lame pun on 'genes' suggestive of the possibility that AI is already operating in the advertising space – has been taken up by loud voices on social media as an unsubtle endorsement of 'Nazi' values, in which blond hair, blue eyes and being thin constitute apex hotness.
'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour,' intones Sweeney in the ad, leaving off the list resting sulking face, vocal fry and indistinguishability from 90% of other women in Hollywood. All of which probably rules out Paltrow for the follow-up crisis-management video.
Let's progress to even shallower water, and words that roll off the tongue like a meditation phrase promising to unlock the meaning of everything: the 'seamless, sculpt face wrap from Skims'. It's an iambic tetrameter and also a new product line from Kim Kardashian, whose amazingly successful shapewear, Skims, advances in a natural progression from body to face sculpting with a new kind of face sling.
The sculpt face wrap might look, at a glance, like something you would be given by an A&E doctor after standing too close to the chip pan, but it's actually 'jaw support' that you wear, like a retainer, overnight to hold back the terrible, glacial progression of jowls. According to the company, this item is not merely a piece of stretchy material you might have fashioned yourself out of an old pair of tights, but rather a 'signature sculpting fabric' made of 'collagen yarn', which for £52 a pop and already selling like hotcakes is definitely a real thing that exists.
Waking to an experience that used to be integral to British summer but feels increasingly rare: rain on the window and a cold tentacle of air seeping in through the crack. It's a strange relief, and also a teachable moment to my kids enjoying their first summer in this country and who have entirely the wrong idea about the place. It's August tomorrow, and for the past six weeks they haven't bounced once from shorts into sweatpants and jumpers and back again, as the rain boots gather dust and my love of waterproof outwear goes unfulfilled.
And while they look out at the rain, grumbling at what it does to the day's plans, I have a first thought out the gate that confirms my final, and total, transformation into my own mother: 'Hmm, good for my plants.'
In my house I'm banned from saying 'skibidi', 'gyatt', 'hyperpigmentation' and 'Ohio sigma' – and this week, a new addition has been made to the list. Grandma-like, I've cottoned on to KPop Demon Hunters – a film in which a K-pop group hunts demons disguised as a boyband, which is breaking records on Netflix as the most-streamed original animated film of all time – and am now forbidden by my children from singing Soda Pop, the tween summer anthem from the movie. 'You're my soda pop, my little soda pop/ Cool me down, you're so hot / Pour me up, I won't stop (oh, oh) / You're my soda pop.'
Happy summer!