Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney
Sydney Sweeney

LOS ANGELES — Sydney Sweeney's provocative new ad campaign for sports prediction market Novig has done what few marketing campaigns manage to do this fall: dominate the cultural conversation for the better part of a week. Whether that attention is translating into a business win for the fledgling betting platform depends on which numbers you look at.

The campaign, released September 10, shows Sweeney nude and covering herself with footballs, basketballs and other sports equipment while repeating variations of the tagline "Novig is just sports." "Think you know sports? Prove it. Novig is just sports. So they wanted to show just sports," Sweeney says in the ad. Later in the spot, reclining atop a pool table, she adds, "You can't trade this. I just look good here."

By any measure of raw attention, the campaign has been a runaway success. The ad had racked up 24.5 million views on Instagram, where Sweeney has nearly 26 million followers, alongside several hundred thousand views on YouTube, according to press coverage of the rollout. Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky said the response exceeded expectations almost immediately. "Sydney is great at captivating audiences and being the center of attention," Fortinsky said in an interview the day the ad dropped, adding that the campaign had "forced" the company into the national conversation.

Sweeney, who joined Novig not merely as a paid spokesperson but as a strategic partner and equity holder in the company, has described her involvement as more substantive than a typical celebrity endorsement deal. "I don't like to just put my face on something," she told Complex. "I really want to be able to get into the weeds of it with an amazing team. And I got to meet the Novig team. Jacob's incredible, and I believed in him as a founder." She characterized the ad's concept in a company statement as straightforward. "The concept is simple: cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports," she said. "The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor and a playful edge. The campaign was about embracing a fun idea."

The attention has not been uniformly positive. The ad has drawn sharp criticism from professional female athletes, who argue it undermines the platform's stated sports focus by leaning heavily on Sweeney's sexuality rather than athletic content. Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer told CNN the campaign is "very damaging" for female athletes and young girls looking to get into sports. Olympic 100-meter semifinalist Bree Masters posted her own response on social media, sharing images of herself competing and writing, "Respectfully Sydney Sweeney... This is what women in sports really look like." Social media reaction more broadly has included comments calling the ad "pathetic," "inappropriate," and, in the words of one widely shared post, "exactly why women in sports aren't taken seriously."

Sweeney addressed the backlash without directly engaging her critics, instead sharing a series of images from ESPN The Magazine's "Body Issue," an annual publication that featured nude and semi-nude athletes during an 11-year run that concluded in 2019, a response widely read as a rebuttal to critics questioning why she, rather than an athlete, was chosen to represent sports imagery. Asked separately whether she wanted to clarify her intentions behind the campaign, Sweeney offered a brief response that quickly became its own viral moment: "I think that when I have an issue I want to speak about, people will hear."

The controversy echoes a similar episode from roughly a year earlier, when Sweeney's ad campaign for American Eagle, built around a pun on "genes" and "jeans," drew accusations that its imagery carried unintended connotations tied to eugenics and white supremacy, a controversy that ultimately did not appear to dent the retailer's broader marketing push.

For Novig specifically, the more relevant question is whether the attention is converting into actual market traction in the competitive and rapidly growing sports prediction market sector. Novig launched nationwide last month as a federally regulated platform and has positioned itself as the only major prediction market maintaining a 21-and-over age requirement, distinguishing it from rivals like Kalshi and Polymarket that allow broader participation and cover non-sports markets including politics and world events. According to one industry-tracking social media account monitoring the sector, "Novig has significantly increased their market share post Sydney Sweeney Ad. Kalshi still dominates the space, but Novig is gaining ground," adding that the "new partnership totally overshadowed Polymarket's signing of LeBron just days prior," a reference to a competing celebrity-driven marketing push in the same industry.

That competitive context is notable because Novig's Sweeney campaign was not the only celebrity-driven advertisement to launch in the sports prediction market space that week. Polymarket released its own ad featuring a crowd of athletes and celebrities including LeBron James, Derek Jeter, Reggie Bush and Spike Lee, while betting platform Betr enlisted "Entourage" stars Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier for a separate campaign. Against that backdrop of competing celebrity marketing pushes, Novig's ad appears to have captured a disproportionate share of public attention, even if quantifying that advantage into concrete market share or user growth figures remains difficult given the private nature of most prediction market platforms' user data.

One detail that has drawn nearly as much scrutiny as the ad's content itself is the gap between where most people have actually watched it. The campaign has drawn more than 24 million views on Instagram compared with fewer than half a million on YouTube, a disparity some commentators have noted underscores both Sweeney's outsized reach on Instagram specifically and the platform-driven nature of how the ad achieved its viral spread. Critics have also pointed out that while the ad itself carries no visible age restriction, the product it promotes is legally limited to users 21 and older, a discrepancy that has become its own subplot in the broader conversation about the campaign.

Whether the campaign ultimately proves successful likely depends on which definition of success is applied. Measured purely by attention, engagement and brand recognition, few marketing campaigns this year have generated comparable reach relative to cost. Measured by reputational risk and the response from the athletic community the platform is ostensibly built to serve, the campaign has generated a level of backlash that some marketing observers say could complicate Novig's efforts to build credibility within the broader sports world it aims to serve. For now, both the viral numbers and the criticism appear likely to keep working in tandem, extending the conversation around the campaign well beyond its original release.