A sports campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney was designed to grab attention and it certainly did but what began as an unconventional take on sports advertising has quickly turned into a wider debate over how women are represented in sport and whether the campaign’s provocative approach has crossed a line. Created for Novig, a US sports prediction market and trading platform in which Sweeney is also an equity partner, the campaign places the actor in a series of striking sports-themed images and videos where she appears nude or minimally dressed alongside basketballs, footballs, a tennis racket, a baseball bat and other sporting equipment. The campaign, released earlier this month, quickly gained traction online, with Novig’s Instagram Reel reportedly crossing 37 million views in four days. While the scale of the response demonstrates the campaign’s ability to break through the crowded social media landscape, much of the conversation has moved beyond the brand itself, with female athletes and sports personalities questioning the decision to use Sweeney’s body as the central visual device in a campaign built around sport.
When the creative idea becomes the conversation
For the athletes who have spoken out, the criticism is not simply about Sweeney appearing nude in an advertisement but about the way her appearance has been positioned within a sports campaign, particularly at a time when women’s sport continues to push for greater recognition based on athletic ability, performance and achievement rather than appearance.
Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer described the campaign as “very damaging” for female athletes and young girls getting into sport, arguing that the portrayal reinforces the kind of hypersexualisation that women in sport have spent years trying to move beyond. Her central point was that women should be valued for what they can do rather than what they look like, a sentiment that has echoed through several of the responses to the campaign. Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus also reacted strongly, saying she was infuriated by the advertisement and arguing that its approach undermines women who have dedicated their lives to sport. In her response, Titmus pointed towards the qualities that define sport for her — teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence and unity — while questioning why the sexualisation and monetisation of women’s bodies continues to feature in sports-related marketing.
The criticism has not been limited to swimming, with water polo silver medallist Tilly Kearns also condemning the campaign, while Australian swimmer Lani Pallister responded by sharing footage of herself training and competing, accompanied by a message contrasting the advertisement with her own understanding of what sport looks like. Boxer Skye Nicholson similarly posted a video calling for brands to stop sexualising women in sport, adding another voice to an increasingly visible athlete backlash.
Sydney Sweeney responds without directly responding
As criticism continued to build, Sweeney did not issue a lengthy public statement addressing the backlash directly. Instead, she appeared to respond through a series of Instagram Stories, sharing photographs of sports personalities including Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe, Rob Gronkowski and Jason Kelce, several of whom have also appeared in nude or provocative advertising and sports-related campaigns. While Sweeney did not explicitly explain why she chose to share those images, the posts appeared to offer a broader point of comparison, suggesting that the use of nudity or provocative imagery in sports advertising is not without precedent and that athletes and celebrities across genders have previously participated in similar campaigns. Whether that comparison addresses the specific criticism being levelled at the Novig campaign, however, remains open to debate.
The response is particularly notable because Sweeney has previously been open about embracing her image and has also been closely involved in the Novig project itself, meaning that she is not simply the face of a campaign created independently of her. According to her own comments, she was involved with the project from the beginning, making the creative direction and its resulting debate as much a conversation about the campaign itself as it is about the celebrity fronting it.
What Novig and Sweeney were trying to achieve
From the campaign’s intended perspective, the idea was to take a playful and unexpected route into sports advertising rather than create another conventional brand film. Sweeney has described the campaign as an attempt to embrace a fun idea, cut through the noise and put the focus on sport, while Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky has also spoken about Sweeney’s interest in sports as one of the factors behind the partnership.
That intention is important because it highlights the gap between what an advertising campaign intends to communicate and what audiences ultimately take away from it. The campaign clearly succeeded in generating attention but the criticism suggests that for a significant section of its audience, the conversation has become less about Novig, sports prediction or the creative idea and more about the portrayal of Sweeney and the sexualisation of women in sport. That disconnect is particularly visible in the online reaction, where some viewers questioned what exactly the advertisement was promoting, while others argued that the imagery was so dominant that it overshadowed the brand proposition itself.
The bigger question for sports advertising
The Novig campaign sits within a much larger challenge facing modern advertising, where brands are constantly competing for attention across increasingly crowded digital platforms and are often turning to celebrity power, provocative visuals, humour and unexpected creative concepts to make people stop scrolling. There is no doubt that Sweeney’s presence gave Novig an enormous amount of visibility and the campaign’s social reach shows how effectively a provocative creative idea can generate conversation. But the controversy also raises a more fundamental question for marketers: if audiences remember the controversy more clearly than they remember the brand message, has the creative actually worked?
For Novig, the campaign has delivered the kind of visibility that most brands would struggle to manufacture organically, while Sweeney has once again become the centre of a major advertising conversation. For the athletes criticising it, however, the issue goes beyond one campaign or one celebrity and touches on the continuing struggle to have women’s sport recognised for athletic performance rather than physical appearance. That tension is ultimately what has made the campaign so contentious. Sweeney and Novig set out to create something that would cut through the noise and bring attention to sport, but the campaign has instead opened up a much broader conversation about how that attention is created, who gets represented and where the line lies between provocative advertising and the continued sexualisation of women in sport.
