On September 9, 2026, a sports-prediction app called Novig put out its first national ad. Sixty seconds. Sydney Sweeney, nude, covering herself with a football, a tennis racket, a baseball bat, a basketball, moving from prop to prop while she says some version of the same line: Novig is just sports. No wars. No deaths. No politics. Just you, your takes, and sports.1 The NFL kicked off its season the same day, and that timing wasn't an accident. I'll come back to why.
Within a week it had passed 12 million views on X and more than 47 million on Instagram, about 400 times what the company's next-best post had ever done.2 It also coincided with Sweeney losing upward of 200,000 Instagram followers, drew public condemnation from Olympic and professional athletes on three continents, and produced the kind of press cycle that normally follows a real scandal rather than a media buy.3
I build the pages that ads like this one point to, so I read a lot of them as landing pages first and cultural objects second, occupational hazard, and not always a flattering one. I went looking for a piece that explained what Novig actually is, legally, before it explained what everyone thought of Sydney Sweeney's body, and came up mostly empty, so here's that reading: the ad as a document written by people trying to accomplish something specific, judged on whether it worked before it's judged on whether it should have been made.
01What Novig is actually selling
Novig is not, legally, a sportsbook. It's a federally regulated prediction market. In June 2026 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved Novig as a designated contract market, the same regulatory category that governs Kalshi and Polymarket, and in August the company retired the sweepstakes-style, dual-currency structure it had been running on and launched a real-money exchange nationwide.4 On that exchange, users trade sports outcomes against each other, peer to peer, with Novig taking a cut of the spread rather than setting odds and absorbing the other side of the bet the way a traditional book does.5
The distinction is the whole reason the category exists in its current form. DraftKings and FanDuel operate under a patchwork of state gaming licenses, pay state-level taxes on that basis, and are excluded from states that haven't legalized sports betting. A CFTC-regulated exchange sidesteps that patchwork by classifying its product as a derivatives market rather than a wager, which is why Kalshi has been able to offer sports contracts in states where sportsbooks can't operate, and why Novig is racing to establish itself in the same lane before it fills up.6 Novig had raised $75 million from investors including Pantera Capital and Multicoin as of February 2026, explicitly to compete with Kalshi and Polymarket for that ground.7
So the company's actual problem, going into September, was not "how do we get people to gamble." It was "how do we get people to know our name at all, in a category where the two incumbents already have theirs, before the NFL season locks in everyone's habits for six months." CEO Jacob Fortinsky said as much afterward, without much hedging: the goal was to "introduce Novig to the nation" and "close the gap from a brand-awareness perspective" against Kalshi and Polymarket.8 Turns out that's a real problem, and a boring one. Nobody writes a viral thread about a challenger brand closing an awareness gap. They write the thread about the actress with a football over her chest.
Which is the part worth sitting with before going further: the same-day timing wasn't incidental. Football season, once it starts, is the one stretch of the calendar where a huge slice of Novig's exact target audience is actively choosing which app gets their action for the next six months. Launch a week later and you're asking people to switch platforms mid-habit. Launch on kickoff day and you're competing for a decision people haven't made yet. "On schedule" isn't a detail here, it's most of the strategy.
02Reading the ad as rhetoric, not just as skin
The sports equipment is doing two jobs at once, and the ad wants you to notice only one of them. The surface job is coverage, standing in for clothing the way a towel does in a locker-room joke. The second job is category signaling: a football, a tennis racket, a basketball, in sequence, tell your eye "this is a sports product" faster than any tagline could, while the tagline does the legal and reputational work instead. Northeastern University psychology professor Rachel Rodgers named exactly this: "the suggestion is very much that she's got hold of the boys' plaything in order to conceal herself," and the equipment itself "doesn't belong to the girls team," meaning it isn't there because Sweeney plays a sport; it borrows sport's visual vocabulary without borrowing sport's actual content, which Rodgers separately called a dated move for exactly that reason.9 It lets the brand claim sports-adjacent legitimacy through imagery while the copy carries the harder, less visual claim that actually needs saying out loud: this product is not the kind of betting people are already primed to distrust.
"No betting on wars, or deaths, and no politics." That line is not a joke. It's a compliance disclosure wearing a joke's clothes.
The line about wars, deaths, and politics is the ad's actual thesis, and it's aimed at a specific anxiety in the prediction-market category rather than at football fans generally. Kalshi and Polymarket both list contracts on outcomes far outside sports, which is exactly what's made both platforms controversial and drawn scrutiny over whether markets on elections, conflicts, or public tragedies amount to gambling on human suffering dressed up as price discovery. Novig's tagline answers that specific reputational risk directly: we are not that platform, we only do sports. Sweeney says it while topless, so the joke does the work of making a genuinely dry compliance point, our contract list is narrower than our competitors', feel breezy instead of defensive. Good copywriting, with an argument that has almost nothing to do with the body delivering it and everything to do with product scope. Northeastern communication studies professor Stephen Warren watched the same spread and called the whole approach "instigating troll sort of thing," a strategy built to be argued about on social platforms rather than bought as paid reach.9 A suited spokesperson saying the identical words in a boardroom clip gets maybe forty thousand views. The nudity is the distribution mechanism.
03The endorsement problem nobody named
Most coverage treated Sweeney as a hired face, the standard arrangement behind a spot like Nick Jonas and Kevin Hart's for DraftKings, where both are widely reported as paid endorsers rather than owners of the business.12 That's not what she is here. Sweeney is widely reported as a strategic partner and equity holder in Novig, not a rented spokesperson, and Fortinsky said openly that "it really was Sydney who was driving a lot of the visuals and the messaging."8 The distinction changes the analysis.
A paid endorser has an incentive to protect her own brand even while cashing the check, because her value to future advertisers depends on staying likeable across campaigns. An equity holder has a different, larger incentive: the value of her stake rises with Novig's user growth and trading volume, regardless of what the campaign does to her personal likeability next quarter. Fortinsky's own self-reported numbers, a billion dollars in cumulative trading volume and what he called "the fastest start of any prediction market in history," are unaudited claims, but they're also the metric that actually mattered to her financially.8
This isn't Sweeney's first controversial campaign, either, and the pattern is worth naming rather than assuming away. In July 2025, American Eagle's "Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans" campaign drew a similar national backlash, over a pun read by critics as flirting with eugenics-adjacent language about genetics. Sweeney's response at the time was near-identical to this one in structure: surprise, followed by a refusal to disown the material.13 American Eagle's own sales and stock climbed during that controversy, not after it faded, per contemporary business coverage, though that's a correlation reporters noted at the time, not a controlled study proving the controversy caused the bump.13 So there is a real precedent here, and it points the same direction Novig's own numbers do: for the brand paying her, the backlash has so far been a cost that shows up in headlines, not in revenue. Whether it shows up eventually in fewer offers for Sweeney personally is a separate, longer bet, and one this piece can't settle in September.
The phrase "influencer marketing" doesn't quite capture this, and "founder-market fit" undersells it: closer to a founder spending her own public image as working capital. By the only metrics Novig has published, that bet paid off.
04The defense that made it worse
After the backlash built, Sweeney responded on her Instagram Stories with a series of images of nude or near-nude elite female athletes, including Serena Williams and Megan Rapinoe, implying her ad sat in the same tradition as body-positive athletic photography like ESPN's long-running Body Issue.3 Warren called the comparison disingenuous, and he's right, for a specific reason: the Body Issue photographs athletes doing or having just done the thing that makes them notable, so the nudity documents an athletic body in the context of achievement the subject actually owns. Sweeney is an actress holding a football she did not throw, for a company in which she holds equity. Comparable-looking images can be doing opposite rhetorical work, which is the same move boxer Skye Nicolson objected to: "there's a big difference between looking 'sexy' because you do sport compared to using sex to sell 'sport.'"10 Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer put the stakes in more concrete terms, calling the campaign "very damaging" for female athletes and for young girls deciding whether sport is a place that takes them seriously.3
The defense mattered because it moved the story from "ad campaign draws criticism," which blows over in days, to "spokesperson mishandles the criticism," which hands reporters a second, easier story. If the goal was maximum reach at minimum ongoing controversy, the Instagram Stories response was a mistake. If the goal was maximum reach, full stop, it was on-brand.
05Did it actually work
Strip out the moral question for a moment, because it's a separate one and I'll come back to it, and just ask the marketing question: against the stated objective, brand awareness ahead of NFL season, did this campaign perform? Section 03's answer, by Novig's own published numbers, was yes. Here's the complication: those are exactly the numbers built to not see the cost this section is about to name.
By reach, unambiguously yes. Twelve million X views and 47 million Instagram views, against a previous best that works out to roughly 120,000 once you divide back through the reported 400x multiple, is not incremental improvement.2 It's a different order of magnitude, delivered for the cost of a production budget and Sweeney's time rather than a paid media buy at anything close to that scale.
But here's the thing reach doesn't touch: Novig isn't a content app. Signing up requires your legal name, date of birth, address, and the last four digits of your Social Security number, and the CFTC's own rules mean Novig can't release funds until that identity check clears, sometimes same-day, sometimes with a government ID uploaded first.14 That's not a criticism of Novig specifically, every CFTC-regulated exchange runs the same gate, but it means 59 million video views hit a wall the ad never mentions. A viewer who's never heard of Novig is one tap from watching a nude celebrity holding a basketball, and roughly four honest steps from actually being able to trade: download, verify identity, wait for clearance, fund an account with a minimum deposit. Reach measures the first tap. It says nothing about how many people cleared the other four steps, and Fortinsky's self-reported billion-dollar volume claim, the only number that would answer that, is his to audit, not mine to take on faith.8
That gap is where the trust question actually lives. The product is asking people to hand over a Social Security number and deposit real money with a company they'd never heard of a week earlier, in a category already associated in the public mind with predatory design and problem gambling. An ad that generates enormous reach while teaching a large, credible slice of the audience (professional athletes with real public standing) to call your brand exploitative and outdated is solving the awareness problem in a way that makes the harder problem (getting a stranger through a KYC check) no easier. More people know the name Novig today than a month ago. A meaningful number of the people best positioned to vouch for a sports-adjacent brand, women who compete professionally, will not vouch for it, and vouching is worth more at the identity-verification step than at the video-view step.
The honest verdict is that the campaign was built for a single, narrow audience, people already leaning toward becoming bettors and traders on some platform this football season, and treated everyone else as acceptable collateral rather than as a market it needed: a coherent strategy, and not a costless one. Sweeney's personal brand absorbed most of the cost, and so did the broader argument women's sports commerce has been making for the past several years, that female athletes can be marketed on athletic merit rather than as decoration. This ad runs directly against that argument at the exact moment it was gaining real commercial traction, which is most of why the athletes quoted above reacted the way they did.11
06The verdict, broken out
What worked, on the brief
- Achieved category-defining reach for near-zero paid media spend, roughly 400 times the brand's prior best-performing post.
- Landed the one message the company actually needed heard, that its contract list excludes wars, deaths, and politics, inside content people chose to share rather than skip.
- Positioned Novig against Kalshi and Polymarket in the public conversation for the first time, which was the CEO's stated goal.
- By Fortinsky's own (unaudited) account, converted an equity holder's personal reach into trading volume, a structural advantage a hired spokesperson couldn't offer.
What it cost
- Traded reach for trust in a category where trust, not awareness, is the harder constraint at the identity-verification step new depositors actually have to clear.
- Alienated professional female athletes specifically, a credible, vocal constituency a sports-adjacent brand would normally want as allies rather than critics.
- Undercut its own defense with a Body Issue comparison that collapsed under five minutes of scrutiny and extended the news cycle.
- Set a category precedent that the fastest way to launch a prediction-market brand is controversy first, which raises the bar for the next entrant and may not be repeatable once the novelty wears off.
None of that resolves the moral question, which is separate from the marketing one and deserves its own answer. An ad can work exactly as intended and still be a bad thing to have made, and I think this one is: it took a real, hard-won argument, that women get to be marketed on what they do rather than how they look, and spent it to sell trading volume, at a moment when that argument had genuine commercial momentum to lose, a specific cost paid by people who had nothing to do with the campaign so a different company could win an awareness race. It worked, and it was still worth criticizing. Both are true at once, and the second doesn't need the first to be false.