Idea, Research, Action (In That Order)
Novig is a sports prediction market, a betting exchange in all but name, and it launched across the US in August. In September it launched its first big campaign with a famous face. Sydney Sweeney, who is also a strategic partner and equity holder in the company, appears nearly nude with footballs and other sports equipment strategically placed, under the tagline “Just Sports”. The campaign went out midweek, Sweeney posted stills to Instagram, and by the weekend of 13 September the response had become a story in its own right.
The responses worth reading came from sportswomen. Gymnast Gracie Kramer posted a photo of herself with the caption “Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing but this is what a woman in sports looks like”. Bree Masters, an Olympic 100m semi-finalist, wrote “Respectfully Sydney Sweeney… This is what women in sports really look like.” Note the respectfully. Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus added her voice, coverage ran from NBC to the Hollywood Reporter, and Fox News reported critics calling the campaign a slap in the face to professional female athletes.
“You end up on the side that helped women, or the side that kept them seen in one way, and therefore one worth.”
Was this naive? I don't buy it. Sweeney isn't a hired face who wandered into a bad brief. She holds equity in Novig, she fronted the campaign under her own name, and when the criticism came she defended it, pointing at the ESPN Body Issue covers of Serena Williams and Megan Rapinoe as her lineage. But those covers were athletes celebrating what their bodies can do, on their own terms, and everyone involved knows the difference between that and an actress undressed to sell a betting product. Sexualisation for attention is the oldest trick in the book. It bought Novig a week of headlines, and it was chosen because it works.
So let's talk about what the trick costs, because it isn't free, it's just paid by someone else. Every time a brand buys attention with a woman's body, it firms up the idea that a woman's body is what she's for. One way of being seen hardens into one kind of worth. And the bill doesn't go to the people cashing in. It goes to the sprinter who wants her time to matter more than her shape. To the teenage girl deciding whether sport is somewhere she'll be valued or looked at. To the athletes who answered this campaign, who have spent whole careers earning the right to be worth what they can do, and were asked this weekend to make that case all over again.
There's a point in every one of these stories where it stops being about one campaign. Everyone in that room faced the choice that brands, and famous women with enormous reach, keep facing: use the platform to help women be seen in full, or take the old trick and the money. History is just the pile of those choices. You end up on the side that helped women, or the side that kept them seen in one way, and therefore one worth. Novig picked. Sweeney picked. The athletes picked too, and their posts will age far better than the campaign.
The maddening part is how good the other choice was. Novig is a month into a national launch, at a moment when women's sport is the growth story in the whole industry, and it had a co-owner with one of the biggest platforms in the world. Imagine that reach spent putting Sweeney beside the athletes, her profile opening doors for their stories. Same budget, same star, and the women posting “this is what we look like” are in the campaign instead of correcting it. Any half-decent round of research would have surfaced that version, because that is what asking women before the shoot does. Keeley Jones would have flipped this brief in an afternoon. It's what we built the MOOD Panel for, hearing how the work lands while there's still time to change it.
So the takeaway isn't “never show skin” and it isn't “run better approvals” either. It's plainer than that. Decide which side of the story you're on before a campaign decides for you. Ask the women your work is about, listen like the answer might change something, and if the honest answer is that your attention strategy spends women's worth to buy reach, find a better idea. There are plenty. The old trick only stays the oldest because it keeps getting picked.
NBC News: Female athletes hit back at Sydney Sweeney's sexualized 'just sports' ad
NBC Philadelphia: Sydney Sweeney's new sports trading ad draws backlash from female athletes
Hollywood Reporter: Sydney Sweeney faces backlash for sexualized Novig ad
Fox News: Sydney Sweeney responds to backlash over controversial sports ad
News24: Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus blasts Sydney Sweeney over sexualised Novig campaign
