For the second time in just over a year, actor Sydney Sweeney is at the center of an advertising controversy that illuminates lurking realities of American culture. This time, Sweeney posed nearly nude, strategically covering her body with various sports equipment, for sports predication market platform Novig.
At one point, while wearing soccer cleats and little else, Sweeney looks at the camera and says, “No betting on wars or deaths and no politics. Just you, your takes and sports.”
No politics, eh?
I find it hard to argue that politics have no bearing on an intentionally provocative ad for a prediction market platform featuring a blatantly sexualized woman during a time when women’s reproductive rights are under attack.
Rage bait works. Hot takes work. Spectacle works. Algorithms reward engagement.
In what appears to be a response to the considerable backlash to the ad, including post after post from Olympic and collegiate athletes showing “what a woman in sports looks like,” Sweeney posted a series of photos from ESPN Magazine’s “The Body Issue.” Discontinued since 2019, the long-running issue featured athletes nude or partially nude, showcasing the power, strength and physicality required for athletic excellence. What Sweeney conveyed in the advertisement is wholly different, namely because she is not, nor is she claiming to be, an athlete of any kind.
Sweeney’s previous marketing firestorm — a campaign for American Eagle — became so polarizing and so contentious that I got death threats for writing about it.
Then, among other things, my column posited that advertisements, like Sweeney for American Eagle and Kendall Jenner for Pepsi, reflect what is pervasive in American culture at that time. And while I maintain that that is true, what is perhaps more interesting is what these advertisements suggest about making money today: If attention cannot be guaranteed, then controversy should do the trick.
Entirely unsurprising, Sweeney is not just the face of Novig’s campaign, but she is also an equity holder in the company. It makes logical sense that she might want Novig to get the American Eagle treatment, too. Anecdotal evidence, from her American Eagle ad to marketing her own bathwater to her own lingerie line, suggests that Sweeney is mightily aware that controversy, outrage and think pieces — like this one — can equate to money. A search for Novig’s financial gains in the wake of the advertisement can be quantified in social media traffic: Novig’s social media mentions grew nine times the original number with Sweeney’s campaign.
Rage bait works. Hot takes work. Spectacle works. Algorithms reward engagement, not morality, or kindness, or community or human decency.
Sweeney is far from the only one to capitalize. Incel-adjacent Clavicular walked in Paris Fashion Week; the Hawk Tuah Girl has a successful podcast; and influencer Winta Zesu told the BBC that “every single video of mine that has gained millions of views is because of hate comments.” As Ana Andjelic, a strategy executive, told Vogue, “You need to create more and more extreme things in order to be picked up by the algorithm. Brands are content factories and the algorithm is teaching them what to put online.”
Sweeney has been transparent that her primary objective is to make money. In a well-received interview with The Sun in 2023, she said, “I take deals because I have to. They don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals. The established stars still get paid, but I have to give five per cent to my lawyer, ten per cent to my agents, three per cent or something like that to my business manager. I have to pay my publicist every month, and that’s more than my mortgage.”
Novig and Sweeney certainly capitalized on a public primed with ongoing, complex and emotionally charged conversations surrounding women in sports and about women’s sexuality and agency.
Indeed, as I also noted in my 2025 column, I cannot and do not blame Sweeney for capitalizing on her sexuality nor her desire to make money. No one woman is safe from objectification, least of all a conventionally attractive actress whose breakout role was staring in a highly sexualized and controversially racy television show.
Whether outrage over this advertisement was explicitly planned for or not, Novig and Sweeney certainly capitalized on a public primed with ongoing, complex and emotionally charged conversations surrounding women in sports and about women’s sexuality and agency. To me, Sweeney’s financial stake in the company and her pointed pronouncement against “politics” in the advertisement makes this all feel deliberate and pointed.
Last time, with American Eagle, there was plausible deniability. Maybe Sweeney really didn’t know. Perhaps, I was wrong in my examination of the American Eagle advertisement. Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, as the saying goes: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
In the end, Sweeney’s morality as an actress, businesswoman or whatever you’d like to characterize her as is resoundingly not the point. Whether I do or do not find this advertisement cheap, or side with the athletes or feel offended is not the point. Whether or not I find ragebait and apathetic internet culture tragically depressing is not the point.
Money is the point. Making Sweeney and Novig as much money as possible is the point. Hello! This is America, after all.
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