Novig's Sydney Sweeney Ad Won Attention, But Can It Convert Controversy Into Real Paying Customers Now?

Novig's provocative marketing campaign featuring actor Sydney Sweeney generated a level of attention few conventional advertising campaigns could match, but industry veterans say the harder test lies ahead: converting viral buzz into funded, retained customer accounts for the sports prediction market platform.

The campaign, called "Just Sports" and launched ahead of the new NFL season, features Sweeney nude or partially clothed, with footballs, boxing gloves and other sporting equipment strategically positioned to preserve her modesty. Its central joke plays on Novig's positioning within the prediction market industry: unlike some rivals, the platform offers only sports-related contracts, without political, war or death-related markets available elsewhere in the sector. Sweeney, who reportedly approached Novig about working together and has since become an equity holder in the company, was closely involved in developing the campaign. She told Complex the concept was enjoyable and aligned with her own interest in sports.

The imagery quickly spread well beyond Novig's existing audience, generating a backlash led primarily by female athletes who argued the campaign reduced women's presence in sports to sexual display. Former UCLA gymnast Gracie Kramer responded by sharing footage of herself competing, captioned, "I don't know what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like." British sprinter Amy Hunt, Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus and water polo player Tilly Kearns were among other athletes who criticized the campaign. International rugby player Sofie Fella separately questioned why advertising budgets were being directed toward the campaign rather than toward investment in women's sport, while other critics argued the ad undermined broader efforts to have female athletes evaluated on their athletic achievements rather than their appearance. The controversy was subsequently covered by outlets including the BBC and The New York Times.

Novig Chief Executive Officer Jacob Fortinsky defended the campaign publicly, saying the company remained "hugely supportive" of women's sport and had never intended for Sweeney to serve as a representative of female athletes generally. Sweeney responded to the criticism separately by pointing to prior nude photoshoots involving elite sportswomen as precedent for the kind of imagery used in the campaign.

Tony Kenny, a communications industry veteran who previously served as head of sponsorship and public relations at William Hill and held a senior communications role at Paddy Power, said the campaign has clearly succeeded at the earliest stage of building a new customer base, even as significant uncertainty remains about what follows. "It has done a brilliant job of getting that attention," Kenny said. "Absolutely, at the top of the funnel it has created awareness. Interest and searches are happening, and downloads are happening. The commercial questions are whether people progress to registration and a funded account, and then whether Novig retains them and creates value from those customers. We are still at an early stage."

Kenny drew a distinction between the kind of consumer response a viral advertisement can generate and the considerably higher bar required to convert that attention into a funded trading account. Unlike Sweeney's earlier campaign for American Eagle, in which seeing her wear a specific pair of jeans could directly prompt a viewer to purchase those jeans, the Novig campaign offers no equally direct link between the imagery and the underlying product being sold. "This is not a free trial; people have to put in their hard-earned cash," Kenny said. "That is a stretch for any gambling company."

While Novig can track how much traffic arrives through links embedded in its advertising and social media channels, Kenny noted that outside observers, and likely much of the company's own leadership, cannot yet determine how many of those campaign-driven downloads translated into registered users, how many of those users went on to fund an account, or whether those who did trade an initial contract returned to the platform afterward. Separating the campaign's specific effect from the broader seasonal uplift tied to the start of the NFL season adds a further layer of difficulty to any attempt to measure its true commercial impact.

Looking beyond the immediate attention generated by the campaign, Kenny said the more fundamental question facing Novig is what the company now wants its brand to represent going forward. "Novig has attention, awareness and some recall, but what does it want to be associated with?" he said. "Sydney Sweeney is now an equity partner. Is she going to be the face of Novig, or will the company pivot? From a communications and marketing perspective, the interesting question is: what next?" That question carries additional weight given that Novig itself is not an inherently self-explanatory name to a general audience; while industry insiders and experienced bettors may recognize it as a reference to "no vig," describing trading without a conventional bookmaker's margin, that meaning is unlikely to be understood by most people encountering the campaign for the first time.

Kenny pointed to his own experience at Paddy Power as an example of how provocative marketing can work when irreverence is genuinely embedded in a brand's established identity, something he said requires sustained consistency rather than a single viral moment. "Paddy Power's irreverence is authentic to the brand, and it creates shareable content," Kenny said. "That is the key." He suggested Novig could attempt to position itself similarly against larger, more corporate-feeling rivals such as Kalshi and Polymarket within the U.S. prediction market sector, but cautioned that sustaining such an identity across a market as large and culturally varied as the United States would represent a substantial ongoing undertaking, one that would require the company to keep producing attention-grabbing campaigns without simply repeating the same approach indefinitely.

"This will be a non-story next week," Kenny said, describing the likely trajectory of public attention around the campaign. "What does it do as attention starts to die down? Does it flood the market with more ads?" For now, Kenny said, Novig has demonstrated a clear ability to seize a cultural moment and overshadow marketing campaigns from far larger, better-established competitors. What remains unproven, in his assessment, is whether the audience the campaign attracted actually understands what Novig sells, remembers the company's name once the controversy fades, or has any real intention of becoming a paying customer.