If female Olympians are all ganging up against you, you know something’s gone wrong. I don’t think that’s what Sydney Sweeney was going for when she signed on to promote the new sports prediction market Novig, but that’s been the outcome of her week.
In case it hasn’t crossed your radar, the
Euphoria actress stars in a new spot in which she is naked with strategically placed sports equipment. First she’s holding two footballs in front of her chest. Then she’s spinning a basketball while sitting naked on top of the basketball hoop. There she is playing tennis in just underwear (no bra). She swings a golf club, lays on top of a pool table, and briefly puts on a boyfriend-sized Novig jersey. She looks at the camera while repeating the word “sports” over and over.
You might read that description and wonder, surely it can’t be that bad? But watch the ad
here—it’s shockingly retrograde.
The simplistic message is by design; the prediction market Novig wants potential bettors to know it’s only for sports (not politics or entertainment like Kalshi and Polymarket). Novig’s CEO Jacob Fortinsky happened to appear at a Front Office Sports event yesterday, and
he said the goal of the Sweeney campaign was to “close the gap from a brand-awareness perspective.”
It might be working. This is the second time Sweeney has caused a major news cycle with an ad campaign; the last one was American Eagle’s “great jeans.” While she and American Eagle were accused of promoting
a eugenic white beauty standard, American Eagle
has repeatedly said the campaign was a success and ultimately drove brand awareness and sales. Sweeney herself seems to understand that controversy sells. (I’ve asked her team for comment but haven’t heard back.)
In a crowded fashion marketplace, though, attention-getting is the point. Sports fandom is personal and emotional. And Sweeney’s ad is bringing up all the wrong kinds of feelings.
Here’s just a sampling of how the ad landed with female athletes:
Four-time Olympic swimming gold medalist
Ariarne Titmus: “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this. How do we live in a world where monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing?”
British sprinter
Amy Hunt: “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like. Muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, tears.”
Australian surfer
Felicity Palmateer: “How far can you put women’s sports backwards in the space of a 42-second commercial?”
This is the kind of marketing we spent years seeing in men’s sports, designed to appeal to male fans. But back then, women’s sports weren’t getting TV spots at all—so it was clear why hyper-sexualization of women was so normalized. Who cared about the female fan? And female athletes weren’t even in the conversation.
I think what got Sweeney into trouble here was that she’s pretending to
play sports in the nude in this ad, not
watch them. And when women who actually excel at basketball, tennis, and soccer are at the center of our culture, they’re an immediate point of comparison, intentionally or not. Her cheeky little ad feels, especially to athletes, like a commentary on women’s place within the game itself. (Maybe if she only held footballs, it would have worked.)
Even Fortinsky said that Novig didn’t intend to release a commentary on women’s sports. “As a company we’re hugely supportive of women’s sports, and it’s a huge component of our platform. We never intended to portray female sports,” he said. “Sydney is an actress, the biggest movie star in the world. We’re a prediction market focused on sports. That is the story she was communicating.” (He also threw her under the bus a bit and said she was “driving a lot of the visuals.”)
But you can’t talk about sports now without talking about women’s sports. And that’s why this ad landed so badly. Female athletes have fought hard to be respected, to be taken seriously in the mainstream sports conversation. And they’re still fighting, as seen in Novig’s very industry; the WNBA players’ union
just criticized the NBA for sending a letter to state gaming regulators with concerns about sports betting without including them. Sweeney’s hyper-sexualized persona might work for her in Hollywood or when
selling bras or
soap, but in sports, we’ve moved on.
Emma Hinchliffeemma.hinchliffe@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
