The Novig advert is 42 seconds long. Sydney Sweeney appears in it with no clothes on, holding pieces of sports equipment in front of herself, and it finishes on the line "it's just sports". It went live on 9 September, the first national campaign for an app that most people could not have named the week before.
By the following weekend, Novig had climbed from somewhere around fiftieth in the sports app charts to eleventh. Searches for the brand roughly doubled against its rivals Kalshi and Polymarket. Sweeney lost more than 200,000 Instagram followers and spent a week as one of the most searched names on the internet. Whether any of that counts as a disaster depends on what you think the advert was for.
The loudest objections came from athletes, and they were unusually specific. The British sprinter Amy Hunt, who won four golds at this year's European Championships in Birmingham and took 200m silver at the 2025 Worlds, posted her own footage with the caption "this is what women in sport look like: 21.4. Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat, tears." The Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus wrote that she could not describe how infuriated she felt watching it. The surfer Felicity Palmateer talked about "how far you can put women's sports backwards in 42 seconds". Tilly Kearns, who plays water polo for Australia, was blunter. What none of them did was insult Sweeney. They posted clips of themselves competing and let people draw the comparison.
Academics who study this had a similar reading. Rachel Rodgers, a psychologist at Northeastern, pointed out the obvious mismatch: sport is about what a body can do, and the advert presents a body doing nothing at all. Cheryl Cooky, who researches gender and sport, argued the campaign reads as a reaction against how much ground women's sport has gained recently. There is something to that timing. The NCAA recorded its highest ever female participation this year, and Bank of America expects revenue from women's sport in the US to more than triple by 2030.
Then there is the part that changes how you read the whole thing. Sweeney is not a hired face in this campaign. She holds an unspecified equity stake in Novig and is described as a strategic partner, which means the company's growth is her growth. She has said the campaign was meant to "cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports". She did not respond to the athletes directly. Instead, she posted a series of Instagram stories showing female athletes from ESPN's Body Issue, ending with her own advert, which invited the reader to see them as the same kind of thing. Stephen Warren, who teaches marketing at Northeastern, called that comparison disingenuous, and argued the campaign was designed from the start to provoke rather than persuade.
The defence of Sweeney is real and worth stating properly. She is an adult who agreed to a job, she is paid in ownership rather than a day rate, and she has been open for years about being comfortable with nudity in her work. In 2022 she told Variety that she had never felt uncomfortable filming those scenes, and that she had asked for some of them to be cut when she thought they were unnecessary. That is a person exercising judgement over her own work, not a person being handled.
What complicates it is something she said two years later, also to Variety. Talking about the way people discuss her body online, she said, "it's this weird relationship that people have with me that I have no control or say over", and that she felt she was "not on a human level anymore". Those two positions can be reconciled. One is about consent and the other is about control, and wanting the first while resenting the absence of the second is coherent enough.
Here is where I stop reporting. I find the reconciliation harder to swallow than that, because of where the line ends up sitting. Sexualisation Sweeney has no say over is dehumanising. Sexualisation she owns a percentage of is just sports. You can hold both of those beliefs without contradicting yourself, and it is still worth noticing that the boundary between them falls exactly along her financial interest. She did not create the incentive that made this advert the efficient thing to do. She priced it accurately, which is a different thing from creating it, and she is also the only person in the story who gets paid for being right about it.
Now the part that has gone almost entirely unreported, and which I think matters more than any of the above.
Novig is not a bookmaker. It is a prediction market, and that word is doing legal work rather than branding work. Sportsbooks in the United States are licensed by individual states and bound by state gambling rules, including rules on how they advertise. Prediction markets claim to sit outside that system entirely, on the argument that what they sell is a financial contract regulated federally by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under commodities law, which would pre-empt state gambling regulation altogether.
Whether that argument works is currently unresolved. The Third Circuit accepted a version of it earlier this year. Then on 28 August the Ninth Circuit unanimously went the other way in KalshiEX v. Assad, holding that sports event contracts are not swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act and that federal law does not pre-empt state gambling law. That is a circuit split, which usually means the Supreme Court eventually. Around nineteen states are now involved in litigation of some kind, Novig itself has sued New York, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Washington to stop them enforcing their gambling laws against it, and tribal nations in California, Wisconsin and New Mexico have brought their own claims. The CFTC proposed rules on 10 June that would define what counts as "gaming" and which sports contracts are allowed. None of it is settled. The advert launched twelve days after the Ninth Circuit ruling, into that gap.
The gap has a practical edge. On 13 August, Novig announced what it called an industry-leading responsible trading framework, written into its own exchange rulebook. It set a minimum age of 21, higher than competitors who accept 18-year-olds, and added deposit and loss limits, cooling-off periods and self-exclusion. It also committed to responsible marketing standards, which the company described as a ban on marketing to anyone under 21.
Twenty-seven days later it ran a nude Sydney Sweeney campaign, on social media, fronted by one of the most recognisable young actors working. I am not claiming that breaches the rulebook, and I have not seen anyone at Novig asked about it. That is sort of the point. If a licensed sportsbook ran this in Britain, there is a body that would have to look at it: under CAP rule 16.3.12, in force since October 2022, gambling advertising here must not be of strong appeal to under-18s, and the ASA weighs whether a featured person is likely to strongly attract their attention or interest. The ASA began targeted monitoring of social media gambling ads in June. A campaign built around Sweeney would at minimum invite that question. Under the model Novig is fighting in court to establish, the only rule that applies is the rule the company wrote for itself, and the only person who can enforce it is the company.
For context on who this product reaches: global sports betting is approaching $125 billion this year, bettors are roughly 69% male, and by one count 98% of documented problem gamblers in online sports betting are men.
The Under-20 Women's World Cup was running while all of this happened. It got less coverage than the advert did. That figure is probably the most useful one in the story, and it is the only one nobody is arguing about.