Sydney Sweeney’s provocative campaign for sports trading platform Novig was designed to cut through the noise.
It has certainly done that.
But several prominent female athletes are now criticizing the campaign, arguing that using Sweeney’s body to sell a sports product reinforces the very stereotypes women in athletics have spent years trying to overcome.
The ad, released last week, features Sweeney wearing little more than strategically placed sports equipment while repeating the campaign’s central idea: “Novig is just sports.”
“Think you know sports? Prove it,” Sweeney says in the spot. “Novig is just sports. So they wanted to show just sports.” The campaign was meant to position Novig as a sports-only prediction market, drawing a distinction between the platform and competitors that allow trading on politics, wars and other real-world events.
Instead, much of the conversation has shifted away from Novig’s product and onto the creative itself.
Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, was among the most prominent critics. “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” Titmus wrote on Instagram.
She called the campaign “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft,” adding that women in sport should be associated with “teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity.”
American gymnast Gracie Kramer responded by posting a highlight reel of her athletic performances with the caption: “Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like.”
The post quickly drew attention from other athletes, including Olympic diver Kassidy Cook.
Australian sprinter Bree Rizzo also joined the criticism, writing that women in sports should be recognized for their “strength, skill, dedication, resilience, confidence and everything they’re capable of achieving.”
British sprinter Amy Hunt made the point even more directly after competing at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship. “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” Hunt said. “Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat, tears.”
Australian world champion boxer Skye Nicolson framed the issue as one of context rather than sexuality itself. “There’s a big difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you do sport compared to using sex to sell ‘sport,’” she wrote.
Nicolson added that there is nothing wrong with athletes embracing femininity while also being competitive.
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The backlash has expanded beyond Olympians.
Marissa Womack, who works in game-day promotions and programming for the Harrisburg Senators, criticized the campaign from the perspective of women working inside the sports industry.
“This isn’t about me being jealous or insecure,” Womack said in a TikTok video. She argued that women already face a constant burden of proving they belong in a male-dominated field and that sexualized representation can discourage younger women from seeing sports as a professional path.
Other social media users have criticized the ad as “exactly why women in sports aren’t taken seriously,” while some questioned why the campaign needed nudity at all.
The response is notable because Sweeney is not simply the face of the campaign.
She is also a strategic partner and equity holder in Novig, giving her a direct stake in the company and making the campaign more than a conventional celebrity endorsement.
When the campaign launched, Sweeney described the concept as deliberately playful. “The campaign was about embracing a fun idea,” she said. “The concept is simple: cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports.”
She added that the execution was designed around “confidence, humor and a playful edge.” Novig co-founder and CEO Jacob Fortinsky similarly argued that Sweeney helped communicate the company’s sports-only positioning “in a way that’s impossible to ignore.”
That last part has proven accurate.
Over the weekend, Sweeney appeared to respond indirectly to the criticism by sharing images of nude or partially nude athletes, including Serena Williams and Megan Rapinoe, on her Instagram Stories.
Neither Sweeney nor Novig had issued a formal response to the criticism at the time of the reports.
The controversy also raises a larger advertising question. Provocation has increasingly become part of Sweeney’s brand value.
Her campaigns frequently generate headlines beyond the media buy itself, and brands know that putting her at the center of provocative creative almost guarantees conversation.
That strategy can be enormously effective when controversy and brand positioning align. The Novig backlash, however, shows the risk.
The campaign was supposed to say “just sports.”
Instead, the conversation is now about representation, sexualization and whether women in sports are being reduced to another advertising device.
From an advertising standpoint, that may be the more important story than whether the spot is “too sexy.”
Novig wanted attention. It got it.
The question is whether it got attention for the thing it actually wanted people to remember.
