Recently, Sydney Sweeney appeared in an ad campaign for an emerging sports prediction
market app, Novig. The 60-second ad shows Sweeney – who is an equity partner in the app –
wearing no clothes but using footballs and basketballs to cover up and repeating the phrase
“Just Sports” to emphasize how the app focuses on sports predictions and not other things like
politics or world events. If you haven’t seen the ad, it is linked here.
Since the ads’ release, it has garnered worldwide media attention, as it has sparked an online
debate over whether it has gone too far in sexualizing women in sports at a time when women
are already rarely taken seriously in athletics. Female athletes already have to fight to be taken
seriously, and when ads like this get put out – equating the sports industry with naked and
sexualized women – it only hurts.
In response, there has been a major social media campaign with many women and sports
organizations posting online videos of prominent female athletes with the message “this is
women in sports.”
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTU3vm4wG/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdRbGW2RMJj/?stkn=MWdxamc5NmwzMDNkdw==
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdWxhW4jFuG/?stkn=d29pMDk2YXMwbHV5
While many on the other side of the debate are saying that people are overreacting, that ignores
the underlying message and problem: female athletes have had to fight tooth and nail to be
taken seriously, to show what they can do, just for people to again focus on what they look like.
In the midst of all this blowback, the thing that many people are overlooking is that, perhaps,
that was the point of the ad. Before the ad, almost no one had heard of Novig, with it facing
steep competition with other prediction market apps like Kalshi. However, the ad now has 2.3
million views on YouTube and the name Novig is everywhere.
By leveraging sex to sell sports, not only did they create a major controversy that has only
increased public attention and brand acknowledgement for their app but it also caters to their
main audience: young adult men. Since the ads’ release, the app has now crossed $1 billion in
trading, and their week-by-week sales increased by 32.7%.
The unfortunate truth is that, despite all of the hard work and progress that many women in
sports have made, which you can read more about here, ads like this will still be made and the
focus stays on sexualized women instead of the strong, hard-working female athletes that the
focus should be on.