If It’s Just Sports, Why Isn’t the Sport the Focus?
Novig wanted attention, and it got it.
The sports prediction market company released an ad featuring Sydney Sweeney posing nude with equipment from several sports. The campaign’s stated message is just sports, but the visual idea has nothing to do with athletic performance. Sport is reduced to a collection of props, while Sweeney’s body does the actual selling.
Female athletes responded quickly. Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus called the advertisement an absolute joke, while athletes across several sports began posting videos of themselves training and competing with the message: This is what a woman in sport looks like.
They are right to be angry. The problem here is the decision to borrow the imagery of women’s sports while removing almost everything that makes female athletes remarkable: their power, discipline, skill, sacrifice and achievement.
There is an important difference between a female athlete choosing to present herself sexually and a company using a conventionally attractive actress to imitate athletes while selling a sports-related product. The first can express agency by someone whose athletic identity is already understood. The second reinforces the tired idea that when a woman enters a sporting context, her body remains more commercially useful than her ability.
Sweeney appeared to respond to the criticism by sharing images of athletes who had posed nude for ESPN’s Body Issue. However, those images centered on the athletes themselves. Their bodies were shown as the result of performance, training, and physical mastery. The Novig advertisement uses sports equipment as a visual joke around a body that is being presented primarily for sexual attention.
Research has demonstrated that audiences recognize this difference. In a study published in Sex Roles, 563 college students viewed different representations of the same female athletes. Images focused on athletic performance received more positive responses than sexualized images, while portrayals that combined athleticism and sexualization still performed less positively than images centered on the sport itself. In other words, showing women as athletes is not only the more respectful choice. It can also be the more effective one.
The timing also makes Novig’s decision feel out of touch. Women’s sports are no longer waiting for someone to discover their commercial value. Deloitte expects global revenues from elite women’s sports to reach at least $3 billion in 2026, an increase of 340 percent in four years. Audiences are growing, media rights are expanding, and sponsors are investing because consumers want to watch women compete.
The argument that sexualization is necessary to draw attention to female athletes has always been insulting. At a time when women’s sports are attracting audiences through the strength of the competition itself, it is also commercially lazy.
Novig had an opportunity to connect itself with one of the most exciting periods in women’s sports. It could have featured athletes, drawn on real competitive tension, or positioned women as knowledgeable sports fans and participants in sports markets. Instead, it relied on a dated advertising shortcut.
The ad may generate enormous reach, but attention is not the same as trust, respect, or relevance. Anger can make a brand visible without making it credible. Calling the campaign successful simply because people are discussing it treats every impression as equally valuable and ignores what consumers learned about the company while watching.
So, what did this campaign communicate about Novig? It suggested that the brand understands how to provoke an audience but not necessarily how to participate meaningfully in sports culture. That may generate views, but it is a weak foundation for a company that describes itself as built for knowledgeable, passionate sports fans.
Whether the backlash was deliberate or not, the advertisement functions as rage bait. It places an obviously provocative image into a cultural conversation, waits for people to object, and then benefits from the distribution their anger creates. The brand receives attention without having to earn it through a better idea.
That strategy is becoming far too common. It works because social platforms reward emotional intensity, and outrage travels quickly. However, brands should be careful not to confuse algorithmic visibility with a strong consumer relationship. A campaign can dominate the conversation while making the brand itself feel less credible.
The athletes responding to Novig have created something far more compelling than the original advertisement. Their videos show strength, concentration, exhaustion, teamwork, and the physical reality of pursuing excellence. Women have spent decades fighting to be recognized as full participants in sports, as athletes, experts, fans, executives, and serious consumers. Yet some brands still approach them through the same narrow visual language, as though women can enter the frame only if their bodies remain the main attraction.
Novig may have wanted to say that its platform is about just sports; its campaign communicated almost the opposite. When given the opportunity to center the sport, the company centered a sexualized image of a woman instead.
Women’s sports do not need this kind of attention. They need investment, coverage, and creative work that understands why audiences are already showing up. The athletes are compelling enough, the competition is exciting enough, and the market is valuable enough.
Brands no longer have the excuse of saying they need to sexualize women to make people care. People already care. The question is whether marketers can respect what they came to see.
Dania Khalife
