Sure, the Novig Ad Went Viral. But Is It Helping the Business?

Everyone is talking about the Sydney Sweeney Novig ad. Whether you love it or hate it, the marketing question underneath it is simple: is it making a positive impact on Novig’s business? I answer versions of this question for a living. Senior marketing leadership without the overhead of a full-time hire is literally what I do, and my answer here is yes, but…

The Yes: From a brand perspective, the ad worked exactly the way most provocative marketing works: it bought attention. Sydney Sweeney’s Novig ad generated a real, measurable spike in brand awareness within days for the sports prediction platform.

The But: From a business perspective, did that spike convert that attention into paying traders generating real revenue? Right now nobody, including Novig, has seen or publicized the answer.

But there’s even more to consider beyond the big question.

What Happened With the Novig Ad

On September 9, 2026, timed to the NFL season opener, sports prediction platform Novig released a national ad called “Just Sports” starring actress Sydney Sweeney. She appears nude or nearly nude across the 58-second spot, covering herself with footballs, a basketball hoop, a pool table, and other sports equipment, delivering lines like “Think you know sports? Prove it” and, in the closing shot, “You can’t trade this, I just look good here.” The ad also carries Novig’s actual positioning statement: “No betting on wars, or deaths, and no politics. Just you, your takes, and sports.” Novig posted the spot to Instagram, where it drew 37 million views in four days.

Sweeney isn’t just the face of the campaign. She’s a strategic partner and equity holder in Novig, having approached CEO Jacob Fortinsky directly to negotiate an ownership stake rather than a traditional paid endorsement.

Why Is the Ad So Controversial?

The backlash came fast, and it came specifically from female athletes. Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus called it “an absolute joke” on Instagram. British sprinter Amy Hunt told BBC Sport, “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” and then cited her own race time. Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer told CNN the ad was “very damaging” for young girls getting into sport.

Two Northeastern University researchers put a finer point on exactly why the sports setting deepened the problem. Rachel Rodgers, an applied psychology professor who studies body image, described a “jarring contrast between it being about sports, which is all about the mastery of being able to, say, kick a ball really hard, and the fact that the person in the picture is there for entirely ornamental purposes.” She also noted the sports equipment “doesn’t belong to the girls team,” calling it “the boys’ plaything” used to conceal rather than compete.

Stephen Warren, a communication studies professor who focuses on sports media, made the more cynical read: going viral for being edgy seems to have been the actual goal. “Now, they’re doing it almost like an instigating troll sort of thing,” he told Northeastern Global News.

The response wasn’t confined to athletes and academics. Sports journalist Megan Feringa, writing in The Athletic, traced her reaction back to the 2014 Always “Like A Girl” campaign, which she watched as a high school senior, and argued the ad ignores everything women in sports have fought for since. “It is sad, even pitiful, that there are still those stuck in that time-warp,” she wrote. Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse made a sharper point about the ad’s own premise. Novig’s positioning claims the campaign is about “just sports,” but Hesse argued its actual message was something else entirely. “Just sex,” she wrote. “That’s the slogan. Fixed it.”

As a Father First and Marketer Second, Here’s What I Think

I’m the father of a daughter who plays club sports at a competitive level. I watch her train the way real athletes train, and I’ve watched the WNBA, the NWSL, and a wave of Olympic athletes build real followings purely by being extraordinary at their sport. That progress is fragile, and an ad like this one leans directly against it.

As a man, I don’t think this ad denigrates women athletes the way American Eagle’s “Great Jeans” campaign denigrated conversations about genetics and race last year. Sweeney isn’t claiming to be a great athlete here. She’s not even in the same category of offense. But I also know the limits of my own perspective on this one. When women, and specifically female athletes, tell me something reads as objectifying in a way I can’t fully feel from the outside, I take that at face value rather than arguing with it. The experts and the athletes both say this ad reads that way. That’s enough for me to believe it.

And some people may not like this, but this is a prime example of why you need lots of different voices and perspectives in the room when considering ideas like this. It doesn’t mean they always kill the idea, but they at least slow down the groupthink and irrational exuberance and help you anticipate land mines.

So, was the ad necessary? From a pure attention standpoint, sure, it worked. But “necessary” implies there wasn’t a better option, and there clearly was. Polymarket and Kalshi have both pulled attention-grabbing stunts this year without needing to put a sexualized form on display to do it. Novig had plenty of other roads to the same destination.

Did the Novig Ad Drive Real Results?

This is the part that matters most for anyone actually running a business.

Novig’s brand mentions across X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Threads, and Bluesky jumped from an average of 392 per week to 4,633 in the four days following launch, an increase of roughly 1,082%, according to an analysis by CAD Management. A separate tracking firm, Peak Metrics, put the increase at “more than ninefold” using a slightly different measurement window. Both numbers describe the same thing: a small brand bought itself an enormous amount of conversation and awareness for the cost of one commercial.

Two prior campaigns give us a rare before-and-after test of what happens once the attention fades and someone has to answer for the results.

Two public companies ran provocative campaigns and had to answer to shareholders about what happened next. One saw a real bump. One saw a bump smaller than the business was already generating on its own. Novig doesn’t have to answer to anyone, and that’s the part worth sitting with. A public company’s marketing claims eventually get checked against a quarterly filing. A private company’s claims of success get checked against nothing but its own press release, and Novig’s press release already told us how it wanted this covered: “confidence, humor, and a playful edge.” The mentions spike is real. Whether it drove revenue is, for now, a matter you’d simply have to take Novig’s word for.

Why Would Sydney Sweeney Take Equity Instead of Cash?

This part of the story has a direct ancestor. In 1997, William Shatner took stock instead of a paycheck to become the “Priceline Negotiator.” The internet has spent twenty years arguing over whether that bet made him $600 million or a much smaller, more ordinary sum (Priceline’s own CEO has called the $600 million figure an urban legend). What’s not in dispute is that the deal became a template: a recognizable face trades a guaranteed fee for a stake in the outcome, betting that their own cultural reach is worth more than what a media buyer would pay for it.

Sweeney’s Novig deal is the same bet with better information. Novig has raised more than $105 million since 2021, including a $75 million Series B that valued the company at $500 million. That’s real money, but it’s also a rounding error next to DraftKings, which spent an estimated $69.5 million just on NFL game advertising in 2025 alone. Combined TV ad spending across sportsbooks and prediction markets was up roughly 40% year over year to $270 million through late August 2026. Novig cannot out-advertise DraftKings. It can, apparently, out-provoke it, and for a tiny fraction of the budget.

That’s the actual strategic logic, and it’s a sound one for a genuine underdog. When you can’t win on media spend, you can sometimes win on media attention, and attention is cheaper to generate than it is to buy. The risk, the one Sweeney and Novig accepted with eyes open, is that the cheapest attention to generate is usually the kind that costs you something else on the way in.

What Actually Differentiates Novig, and Why Nobody’s Talking About It

The line that got buried under all the outrage over Sweeney’s wardrobe is the one that actually matters for Novig’s business: “No betting on wars, or deaths, and no politics.”

That’s a direct shot at Novig’s two biggest rivals. Kalshi came under fire for allowing contracts tied to the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Polymarket’s own brand ambassador drew backlash for promoting the platform in the same breath as commentary on a live murder trial. Both platforms also allow traders as young as 18, while Novig requires users to be 21, the same age floor as a casino, and has built that restriction into its marketing.

This is a real, defensible market position. It’s also the kind of thing that’s genuinely hard to communicate through a 58-second ad, which is probably why Novig reached for the ad it made instead. A sober explainer about contract categories and age verification doesn’t get 37 million views in four days. A nearly nude celebrity does. If I’m honest, this campaign’s real tragedy is what got buried: the actual differentiation, the thing that should have earned trust with a wary regulator and a skeptical public, reduced to a single throwaway line in an ad built to be talked about for entirely different reasons.

What This Means for Your Mid-Market Brand

You are very unlikely to ever run a campaign with Sydney Sweeney’s reach or Novig’s appetite for risk, and you shouldn’t want to. But the underlying decision every CEO in this situation faces is the same one Novig’s leadership faced: when you can’t win on spend, do you buy attention with shock, or do you earn it with a genuinely differentiated position, stated clearly enough that people repeat it back correctly?

I’ve spent twenty years on the side of the second answer, including years running partnership marketing for a Fortune 500 entertainment brand where a single misjudged campaign could do real, lasting damage to a family-facing reputation built over decades. The lesson from that work holds here: attention you generate by making people uncomfortable is attention you have to spend again convincing them to trust you. Attention you generate by being clearly, specifically better at the thing your customer actually cares about compounds instead of costing you twice.

Novig had that second kind of story sitting right there. No wars, no deaths, no politics, a 21-plus floor in a category full of teenagers trading on their phones. That’s a message a mid-market CEO can actually use without needing 42 million Instagram views to make it land.

Novig isn’t the first company to make this bet, and it won’t be the last. In a follow-up post, I dig into three companies that ran the exact same play, Carl’s Jr., GoDaddy, and Victoria’s Secret, and what happened to each of them once the attention wore off.