Sydney Sweeney May Not Be Selling You Anything Except the Argument

Sydney Sweeney’s new Novig campaign has been criticised by female athletes for sexualising women in sports. But as the advert racks up millions of views and drags an unfamiliar brand into headlines around the world, I’m beginning to wonder whether outrage isn’t a side effect of the campaign at all. Maybe it is the distribution strategy.

I had never heard of Novig before Sydney Sweeney took her clothes off for it.

That feels relevant.

Novig is a sports prediction market platform, and on 9 September it launched what it described as its first national brand campaign, starring Sydney Sweeney. She is not simply a celebrity hired to pose with a product, either: according to the company, she has joined Novig as a strategic partner and equity holder. The campaign’s stated idea is that Novig deals in “just sports”, unlike prediction markets that allow people to trade on other subjects. Apparently the creative route to communicating this was Sydney Sweeney wearing very little while strategically positioning various pieces of sporting equipment.

Subtle.

Within days, female athletes were publicly criticising the campaign. Four-time Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus said she found it infuriating; British sprinter Amy Hunt referenced the controversy after competing in Budapest; other athletes began posting their own images of women actually participating in sports under variations of the message that this is what a woman in sports looks like. Their objection is not particularly difficult to understand. Women’s sports has spent decades fighting to have female athletes discussed in terms of their performance rather than their bodies, and along comes an advert for a sports platform in which one of the most famous women in the world is barely dressed and pretending to play several of those sports.

Four-time Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus criticised the campaign's use of a woman's body to sell a sports product.

You can think the advert is funny. You can think the criticism is excessive. You can think Sydney Sweeney should be allowed to use her body however she likes. You can think women choosing to sexualise themselves and women being sexualised by an industry are not always the same thing. You can even hold several of those thoughts at once, because human beings remain inconveniently resistant to becoming Twitter polls.

What interests me more is what happened next.

Everybody started talking about Novig.

Sydney Sweeney in Novig’s “Just Sports” campaign, which quickly became a much bigger conversation than the product itself.

The Argument Is Doing the Advertising

The campaign reportedly amassed more than 22 million views within its first two days. It generated headlines across entertainment publications, sports media and general news outlets. Athletes responded to it. Commentators responded to the athletes. Other people responded to the commentators responding to the athletes. The advert stopped being an advert and became a conversation people felt compelled to have an opinion about.

Which is incredibly useful if, like me approximately five minutes ago, a substantial number of people have absolutely no idea what Novig is.

That is where I struggle to believe that the controversy can be treated merely as an unfortunate misunderstanding surrounding an otherwise straightforward campaign. Novig itself describes the concept as deliberately cutting through the noise, and Sweeney said the campaign was intended to approach that idea with humour, confidence and playfulness.

Well.

The noise has certainly been cut through.

The question is whether we have reached a point in advertising where provoking the argument is more valuable than persuading everybody to like the advert.

For most of advertising history, brands have wanted attention. That part is hardly revolutionary. Shock advertising is older than social media. Sex has been used to sell products that have virtually nothing to do with sex since somebody first realised that attractive people can apparently make us want beer, perfume, hamburgers, cars and watches.

What feels different now is the machinery surrounding the provocation.

An advert no longer needs merely to be seen. It can be debated.

And debate has distribution built into it.

Every angry quote-post republishes the campaign. Every defence of Sydney Sweeney names Sydney Sweeney. Every article explaining why female athletes are angry has to tell you what Novig is. Every TikTok titled “Why everyone is mad about the Sydney Sweeney ad” spends sixty seconds showing or describing an advert that Novig would otherwise have had to pay to place in front of you.

Advertising used to interrupt the conversation.

Now the dream is to become the conversation.

Sydney Sweeney Has Become Very Good at This Particular Kind of Attention

There is another reason this feels less accidental.

This is not the first time Sydney Sweeney has found herself at the centre of a campaign that immediately stops being about the product and becomes an enormous cultural argument.

Her 2025 American Eagle campaign triggered days of debate over its “great jeans” wordplay, sexualisation and the implications people read into its language around genes. The conversation expanded far beyond denim until people who had never shown the slightest interest in American Eagle were debating an American Eagle advertisement. The Novig controversy is different in substance, but the pattern is familiar: put Sydney Sweeney in an intentionally provocative campaign, wait for the internet to split itself into factions, and watch the campaign acquire a reach no ordinary media buy could guarantee.

That does not mean Sweeney is secretly sitting in a darkened room engineering culture wars between takes.

It does mean brands now know what happens when they cast her.

Her public image has become unusually combustible. She represents sex appeal to one audience, an argument about objectification to another, an argument about female agency to another, an argument about political overreaction to another and an argument about the internet’s inability to behave normally around attractive women to practically everyone else.

That makes her tremendously valuable.

Not because everybody likes her.

Because everybody seems to have something to say about her.

There is a difference.

The safest celebrity endorsement gives a brand borrowed affection. The more interesting modern version gives a brand borrowed discourse.

The Athletes Aren’t Missing the Joke

There is a temptation whenever something like this happens to reduce the backlash to evidence that people have become humourless.

It's tongue-in-cheek.

She's in on the joke.

She's choosing to do it.

Everyone is too sensitive.

But those responses do not actually invalidate what the athletes are saying.

Their criticism is not necessarily that Sydney Sweeney personally lacks the right to pose naked. Their criticism is about the visual language being used to represent women in a sporting context.

Those are different arguments.

Female athletes have spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to get the culture surrounding women's sport to focus on achievement, technique, strength, competition and performance. An Olympic champion looking at a sports advert dominated by a famous actress's naked body and saying, essentially, Are we seriously still doing this? is not an irrational response.

And it is particularly interesting that the product itself is not women's sportswear, beauty or fashion. It is a sports prediction platform. The sporting equipment primarily functions as a visual device around Sweeney's body.

That is why the criticism lands differently from, say, a female athlete choosing to pose nude in a magazine project about athletic bodies. Context changes meaning.

The advert is playing with that context deliberately.

Which is also why I don't entirely buy the defence that everybody who objects simply failed to understand the humour. Advertising professionals are not innocent bystanders to visual interpretation. If your concept depends on taking one of the most sexualised actresses in contemporary pop culture, removing most of her clothes and surrounding her with sporting equipment, you cannot be astonished when people interpret the result through the sexualisation of women in sport.

The controversy is not something viewers mysteriously introduced into the campaign.

It is sitting there in the creative.

But Did It Work?

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

Because if the goal was awareness, yes.

Spectacularly.

Business Insider reported that social mentions of Novig jumped ninefold amid the campaign, even while questions remain about whether all that attention will turn into meaningful long-term customer growth.

And this is the distinction that matters.

Attention is not the same thing as persuasion.

A campaign can become famous without making anybody like the company. It can make millions of people aware of a product they have no intention of using. It can alienate exactly the demographic a brand might later discover it wanted. It can generate impressive social metrics while leaving behind very little except the memory that everybody was angry for three days in September.

That is the gamble — no pun intended, although apparently we've all been dragged into sports prediction now.

Outrage is incredibly good at the top of the marketing funnel.

It is less predictable further down.

Millions of people now know the Novig name. How many understand what the product actually does? How many are eligible users? How many trust the brand more because of the campaign? How many downloaded it? How many will still remember Novig six months from now rather than simply remembering “that naked Sydney Sweeney sports advert”?

Those are very different measurements of success.

And I think modern advertising sometimes deliberately blurs them because enormous view counts are much easier to celebrate than complicated questions about what all those views were worth.

The campaign quickly produced a second layer of content: people weren't only discussing the advert, but debating whether the controversy itself proved the marketing had worked.

We Have Entered the Era of Rage-Bait Advertising

The internet taught individual creators something very quickly: anger can be extraordinarily good for reach. Social platforms tend to reward interaction, and the machinery distributing a post does not necessarily care whether somebody clicked because they loved what they saw or because they were appalled by it. A furious comment still adds engagement. A quote-post declaring something “disgusting” still puts the original in front of another audience. A three-minute rebuttal video cannot exist without first explaining the thing it is rebutting, and the person who sends an advert into the group chat with have you SEEN this? has just volunteered to distribute it.

Brands are perfectly capable of learning the same lesson. That does not mean every controversial campaign is secretly the result of executives sitting around a table plotting exactly how many people they can irritate before lunch. Advertising is full of ideas that companies genuinely expect to land one way and audiences receive entirely differently, and sometimes a bad advert really is just a bad advert. But provocation is no longer necessarily evidence that a campaign has failed. In the right circumstances, it can become part of the media strategy itself.

The perfect rage-bait advert gives almost everybody something to do with it. One group condemns the campaign; another condemns the condemnation. The first says the second has missed the point, while the second insists the first has forgotten how to take a joke. Somebody asks whether feminism means Sydney Sweeney should be able to pose however she likes. Somebody else wonders why so many supposedly empowering advertising campaigns still seem to arrive at the conclusion that a woman should take her clothes off. Then somebody inevitably writes a think piece about the whole thing. Hello.

Meanwhile, underneath all that argument, the company name keeps circulating. Every new layer of discourse gives the original campaign another reason to be shown, discussed, searched for and explained. What would once have been an advert becomes a renewable source of content.

The Product Is the Conversation

Perhaps that is the more interesting shift. Companies once made adverts primarily to tell us something about a product: what it did, why we wanted it, how it might improve our lives, or at least why the person drinking that particular fizzy drink seemed mysteriously happier than the rest of us. Increasingly, some campaigns seem designed to tell us something about ourselves instead — or, more accurately, to provoke us into publicly announcing what we believe ourselves to be.

Your reaction becomes part of the campaign. Maybe you think the advert is sexist. Maybe you think the athletes criticising it are overreacting. Maybe you think Sweeney is simply exercising agency over her own image. Maybe you think the more interesting problem is a sports-prediction company using sexualised imagery in the first place. Maybe you have concluded that everybody involved urgently needs to log off and spend twenty minutes looking at a tree. Whatever your conclusion, you have now spent time thinking about Novig.

That is what makes this kind of advertising so effective. It does not require consensus because disagreement is precisely what allows it to travel. A campaign everybody mildly likes may earn a few approving comments and disappear. A campaign that divides people gives them a reason to keep returning to it, defending their interpretation of it and showing it to other people so those people can choose a side too.

Sydney Sweeney is particularly valuable in this environment because the internet appears incapable of being normal about her. Her body has become part of an ongoing cultural argument. What she wears generates discussion; what she does not wear generates more. The photographs themselves become discourse, then the reaction to the photographs becomes discourse, and eventually the reaction to the reaction develops its own ecosystem. Brands that hire her are not operating outside that context. Whether deliberately or otherwise, they are buying access to it.

So Is the Ad Sexist, Clever or Both?

This is where I disappoint anybody hoping for a neat verdict, because I don't think the two possibilities cancel each other out. I understand exactly why female athletes object to the campaign, and I also find it difficult to believe that nobody involved understood the attention that would follow from putting Sydney Sweeney, one of the most heavily sexualised actresses in contemporary pop culture, behind strategically positioned sporting equipment.

An advert can be strategically clever and culturally regressive at the same time. Effective marketing is not necessarily admirable marketing, just as something one person finds funny can genuinely frustrate somebody else without either response making the other impossible. The more useful question, for me, is not whether Sydney Sweeney should have been allowed to make the advert. Of course she should. It is whether the rest of us recognise the advertising ecosystem we enter when we respond to it.

Once controversy becomes distribution, outrage acquires commercial value. A brand no longer necessarily needs everyone to love its campaign; it may only need enough people to feel strongly enough about it that they circulate it themselves. That creates an uncomfortable little problem for anyone who wants to criticise this kind of advertising, because criticism can become part of the mechanism that makes the campaign successful.

Which leaves me with the irritating question I suspect these campaigns are increasingly designed to provoke: when I talk about the advert, am I analysing the advertising, or am I helping to do the advertising for them?

Before this week, I had never heard of Novig. Now I have written an entire essay about it.

Fair play, I suppose.