Sydney Sweeney’s provocative Novig campaign attracted millions of views, but did it build the betting platform’s brand – or merely make its celebrity partner more famous?
“Attention is the easy part. Attention is not brand building.” Prof. Roland Goldberg examines whether Novig’s controversial Sydney Sweeney campaign delivered meaningful exposure.
Female athletes answered Novig’s multimillion-dollar campaign with brief clips of themselves training and competing – and may have emerged as its real marketing winners.
Sex may attract attention, but research suggests it does little to improve brand recall or consumers’ intention to buy. Prof. Goldberg explains where advertising budgets go to die.
If consumers remember Sydney Sweeney but cannot name the company or explain what it sells, can the campaign really be called effective marketing?
American actress Sydney Sweeney is once again at the centre of a storm after the 29-year-old appeared in a series of provocative advertisements for the online betting platform Novig, in which she holds an equity stake.
It seems to be business as usual for the Euphoria star, who also stirred the pot last year after appearing in a series of American Eagle jeans advertisements, with detractors accusing the campaign of promoting eugenic ideas.
In the Novig advertisements, Sweeney appears in various stages of undress and in suggestive poses under the tagline ‘Just Sports’. The campaign has drawn the ire of numerous female athletes worldwide and prompted a barrage of accusations that it sexualises women’s sport.
Sweeney, the campaign and Novig have dominated headlines ever since, but an important question remains: Is this effective brand exposure, and is the publicity worth the backlash?
In the short term, yes, says Prof. Roland Goldberg, a marketing expert at the North-West University (NWU). However, he cautions: “Attention is the easy part. Attention is not brand building.”
Goldberg says Novig is not an established beer or clothing brand, but a new sports prediction market that allows users to trade on the outcomes of sporting events. It is competing against larger players such as Kalshi, Polymarket and Robinhood.
As the smaller participant in a crowded industry, it needs consumers to learn its name. The campaign has generated attention, with reported figures indicating tens of millions of views and a steep rise in brand mentions.
“For a company almost nobody had heard of three weeks earlier, that is quite an achievement. Anyone claiming that the campaign flopped isn’t being straight with you,” Goldberg says.
Goldberg points to a meta-analysis by Wirtz and colleagues, published in the International Journal of Advertising, which combined 78 studies. It found that sexual content improved people’s recollection of an advertisement, but not necessarily of the brand. It had almost no effect on their intention to buy, while attitudes towards the brand tended to become more negative.
Responses also differed by gender: men generally viewed sexualised advertisements favourably, while women tended to dislike them strongly.
“When people say sex sells, what they should be saying is that sex gets looked at. Those are two different things, and the gap between them is where marketing budgets go to die.”
Novig’s central strategic mistake, Goldberg argues, lies in the mismatch between its product and the identity created by the campaign. The platform is selling trust in an industry where trust is scarce. It presents itself as a regulated exchange with no house margin, does not limit winners and restricts participation to people aged 21 and older.
Yet its national introduction positioned it as the provocative newcomer.
“Those two things don’t fit together. The advert isn’t selling the product. It’s selling the celebrity.”
The campaign may also have misread an important audience. Women’s elite sport is expected to generate about $3 billion in revenue this year, according to Deloitte, and is attracting increasing sponsorship investment. Yet, as women’s sport professionalises rapidly, Novig chose to depict women in sport as decoration.
The strongest response came from female athletes. Instead of merely voicing their objections, they posted training and competition footage with captions such as, “This is what women in sport look like.”
Goldberg describes their posts as a spontaneous counter-campaign created by the very people on whom the sporting industry depends. He believes their content was more compelling than Novig’s campaign.
His objection is not primarily moral. Sexualised advertising has existed for more than a century and is unlikely to disappear. Rather, he considers the campaign creatively lazy because it relies on Sweeney’s fame and the shock value of its imagery.
“You could swap Novig’s logo out of that advert for any other brand and nothing about it changes, and that’s more or less the definition of a weak ad.”
Goldberg offers a simple test: cover the logo and ask whether the brand remains identifiable. If not, the advertiser has purchased fame for the celebrity rather than itself.
This is particularly relevant for South African marketers. Advertising is self-regulated through the Advertising Regulatory Board, and reputational damage travels quickly in a small market. Betting brands also operate amid serious concern about gambling advertising and its exposure to young people.
“The very last thing you want to be is the brand that got famous for being cheeky. That’s an expensive kind of famous.”
For Goldberg, the athletes ultimately emerged as the campaign’s real winners.
The advert undoubtedly made people look. Whether it made them remember or trust Novig is another question entirely.
That is the naked truth.
Prof. Roland Goldberg
