Novig CEO Finally Speaks Out About the Controversial Sydney Sweeney Nude Ad and Their Intentions

Updated September 15, 2026, with Novig’s official statement, the CEO’s fuller comments, Sweeney’s response, new athlete reactions, and the fallout on her following. This is a follow-up to our original coverage of the backlash.

Novig’s own statement on its Sydney Sweeney ad is the best place to start, because it’s where the company tells on itself. “We never intended to portray female sports,” CEO Jacob Fortinsky told Front Office Sports. “Sydney is an actress, the biggest movie star in the world. We’re a prediction market focused on sports. That is the story she was communicating.” He went further, confirming Sweeney, who holds equity in the company as a strategic partner, wasn’t just the face of the campaign.

“It really was Sydney who was driving a lot of the visuals and the messaging.”

Asked about the goal, he was blunt: introduce the brand “to the nation,” close the gap with bigger rivals like Kalshi and Polymarket, and by his own numbers, it worked, more than 12 million views on X, over 47 million on Instagram, and a billion dollars in cumulative trading volume he calls the fastest start of any prediction market in history.

Read that statement closely and the company has already answered the question everyone’s been asking. This was never about women’s sports. It was never about sports at all, not really. It was about grabbing attention using a nearly-nude movie star, and the company is saying so, on the record, without much embarrassment. That’s worth sitting with before getting to the ad itself, because it reframes everything that follows. The backlash from Olympians and working athletes isn’t a misreading of a well-intentioned sports campaign. It’s a correct reading of an attention campaign that borrowed the language of “just sports” to sell something that had nothing to do with sport.

Sydney Sweeney’s new ad, for some kind of sports betting app or prediction market or whatever it’s technically classified as, has the internet in a chokehold again. The usual battle lines have formed: prudes vs. body-positivity defenders, “she can do what she wants” vs. “this sets women back.” But that framing misses the actual problem.

This isn’t an either/or situation. The sexualization itself is a real problem, not just background noise to the bigger story, and so is who’s profiting from it, where it’s being shown, and why the timing feels so backward.

Front Office Sports broke down exactly why Fortinsky says he picked Sweeney for the campaign:

Sydney Sweeney used her "ability to captivate audiences," says Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky. The sports prediction market cofounder explains why he believed Sweeney was the right choice to "make Novig a household name." https://t.co/PV7kZ2HB8s

— Front Office Sports (@FOS) September 15, 2026

Wait, why does a betting app need nudity at all?

Sit with that question for a second, because it’s the whole crux of this. What does placing a wager on a football game have to do with a woman’s naked body? Nothing. There’s no functional, logical link between the two. That gap is exactly what makes this ad an act of sexualization rather than a creative risk. The nudity isn’t illustrating the product; it’s being used to hold attention while the product plays in the background.

We’ve seen this playbook before, and it was supposed to be retired

Hollywood was ground zero for #MeToo, the reckoning that exposed how routinely the entertainment industry had used women’s bodies, often coercively, as currency for roles, publicity, and sales. That reckoning rippled outward into advertising as a whole. Carl’s Jr. quietly retired its parade of bikini-clad models draped over burgers, a campaign strategy the chain leaned on for over a decade with stars like Paris Hilton and Kate Upton. Super Bowl car commercials that once treated women as human hood ornaments largely disappeared too, replaced by cast-heavy, joke-driven spots that don’t need a woman’s body to hold attention.

To be fair, this particular ad wasn’t made by a movie studio; it’s a betting company’s marketing campaign, not a Hollywood production. But it stars one of Hollywood’s biggest names, at a moment when the industry that trained audiences to expect this kind of imagery is supposed to know better. That’s what makes it land less like a bold creative swing and more like a format everyone agreed to retire, quietly brought back through the back door.

Why does showing female athletic talent require nudity at all?

Look at what she’s actually doing in the ad: mock tennis, golf, hockey, baseball. That’s supposed to represent athletic skill and movement. So why does representing that require her to be nearly nude? A tennis swing, a golf stroke, a hockey shot don’t need bare skin to read as athletic. Real athletes perform those exact movements fully clothed, in uniform, every single day, and it’s still recognizable as sport. Stripping that context away and replacing it with near-nudity is a choice, not a neutral one. It says the talent wasn’t the selling point. Her body was.

This trick isn’t new. Axe, Carl’s Jr., and a decade of lad-mag covers all built entire identities around using a woman’s body to sell something to a male audience, whether or not the product had anything to do with her. But even those brands eventually learned that leaning on a woman’s body reads as dated, not daring, once audiences stop rewarding it. Doing the same thing under the banner of “women’s sports” makes it worse, not better. It dresses up the oldest formula in advertising as if it’s suddenly progress.

This ad also ran as mainstream advertising, pushed into feeds and tied to football season programming, not something anyone opted into. That’s a very different kind of placement than a magazine cover someone chooses to pick up. It also means kids watching football with their families are seeing it, whether their parents want them to or not. That’s a real problem on its own, separate from anything else going on here.

Shock-value marketing can work. This time, it may have backfired.

To be fair to Novig, shock-value marketing isn’t inherently a bad strategy. It has a real track record. Calvin Klein built a decades-long identity on provocative imagery. Benetton ran controversial, headline-grabbing campaigns for years and turned outrage into a recognizable brand voice. Even in betting specifically, edgy marketing has moved the needle before. The formula works when the shock is tied to something the brand actually wants to be known for, and when the backlash, even if loud, settles into net-positive name recognition instead of curdling into a credibility problem.

Novig’s numbers, on paper, look like that formula working. Millions of views, a reported ninefold spike in social media mentions, and Fortinsky’s own claim that the company just crossed a billion dollars in cumulative trading volume. By the metric the company says it cares about most, brand awareness, the campaign delivered.

But there’s a difference between controversy that builds a brand and controversy that just gets attention while damaging it. Provocative ads tend to work when the shock reinforces what the company wants to stand for: cheeky, confident, in on the joke. This one may have backfired instead, because the specific shape of the backlash isn’t generic outrage that fades in a news cycle. It’s coming from a credentialed, repeat-appearing group, Olympians, working athletes, sports journalists, who are making a specific, hard-to-dismiss argument: that the ad borrowed the language and imagery of women’s sports to sell something that had nothing to do with women’s sports, at the exact moment women’s sports has fought for legitimacy on its own terms. That’s not the kind of criticism that burns off in a week. Shock value that alienates the community you say you champion isn’t provocative marketing working as intended. It’s provocative marketing missing its target.

Who’s this ad even for?

Here’s a question that’s gotten lost: sports betting isn’t a men-only hobby, even if the industry still treats it that way. If the pitch is “come bet on sports,” an ad built entirely around a nearly-nude woman performing for the camera doesn’t exactly say “this product is for you” to a female bettor. It says the opposite: that the target customer, and the person making the buying decision in the boardroom, is assumed to be a man.

Women’s bodies were never meant to exist for the male gaze in the first place, and dressing this up as “just sports” branding doesn’t change what’s actually happening here: the bet, so to speak, is that men will tune in for her body instead of her talent. That’s not a marketing strategy built around sport. It’s one built around who the industry assumes is watching.

The numbers back up why that assumption exists. Sports betting and gambling remain one of the most male-dominated industries in corporate America:

• Women hold only around 29% of executive roles in gambling companies; men account for roughly 70% of leadership positions industry-wide.
• On the customer side, the split is even starker. Surveys show about 73% of men say sports betting is a preferred activity, compared to 40% of women.

Put plainly, a boardroom that is roughly 70% male decided that the way to sell a betting product was to put a nearly-nude woman on screen, aimed at a customer base the industry has already decided is male by default.

Here’s what the data on women’s sports viewership actually says

It’s worth checking the assumption that men just don’t watch women’s sports, because the real numbers complicate that. A Nielsen study found that 52% of the U.S. population is now interested in women’s sports, and ESPN’s own data shows its women’s sports content runs close to a 50-50 gender split among viewers; men reportedly make up about half of WNBA viewership and nearly two-thirds of NCAA women’s basketball viewership. Genuine male interest in women’s sports is real, and it’s been growing.

That actually sharpens the problem here instead of solving it. If men already show up for women’s sports without needing a nearly-nude ad to lure them in, then the nudity in this campaign wasn’t necessary to build a male audience for women’s sports. It was a choice. And that choice raises the real question: is this ad reaching men who already care about women’s sports, or a different audience entirely, men who don’t care about the sport but do care about a nearly-nude actress? Those are two different groups, and dressing the second one up in the language of the first doesn’t make it a women’s sports campaign.

Now picture the male version of this ad

Here’s a quick test for whether this is really about “just sports”: imagine the equivalent campaign aimed at men. A well-known, mostly nude male actor, mock-playing football and basketball and baseball, to sell a betting app to a male audience. That ad doesn’t exist, and it’s hard to picture a major brand greenlighting it, because nobody assumes men need to be sexualized to care about sports or betting. Men are treated as an audience that shows up for the actual content: the odds, the stats, the games themselves.

That asymmetry is the real evidence of what’s going on. Nobody is proposing a nearly-nude male athlete performing for the camera to sell a men’s sports product, because nobody thinks that’s required. It’s a marketing move reserved specifically for how women get sold, in sports or otherwise, and that’s the actual definition of the male gaze at work here: one gender’s body is treated as the hook, and the other’s isn’t.

If this was really about sports, where were the actual athletes?

Here’s the part that exposes the “just sports” pitch as hollow: real sports advertising uses real athletes. NFL ads use NFL players. Nike and Gatorade campaigns use working athletes, male and female. Authenticity sells, and it’s not hard to find. So if a betting app genuinely wanted an ad about sports, there’s an obvious move it skipped entirely: hire an actual female athlete to represent it. Instead, it hired an actress with no competitive sports background and had her simulate playing several sports while mostly undressed. That’s a choice, and a telling one. It swapped athletic credibility for spectacle. If you want a reminder of what actual sacrifice in women’s sports looks like, look no further than the Hyrox champion who kept racing, and won, after a bodily accident mid-competition. That’s what commitment to sport actually costs.

Female athletes noticed exactly that gap, and they didn’t hold back. Four-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Ariarne Titmus called the ad “a kick in the face” to every woman who has spent her life perfecting her craft and to what sport is actually about.

“I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this.” — Ariarne Titmus, four-time Olympic gold medalist

American gymnast Gracie Kramer kicked off a viral trend with her own highlight reel, captioned simply:

“Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like.” — Gracie Kramer, gymnast

The post was liked by nearly a million people and set off a wave of other athletes and creators posting their own highlight reels in response, from Australian Olympic swimmer Lani Pallister to track sprinter Bree Rizzo, with even the Australian Institute of Sport posting its own version featuring archery, gymnastics, boxing, and softball.

The trend spread well beyond professional athletes, too, with sports content creators and everyday women in sports adding their own entries alongside the same message: this is what actually belongs in the conversation about women in sports.

@itsemraine THIS is what women in sports look like… YEARS of fighting for a seat at the table. #sydneysweeney #womeninsports #sportscontentcreator #girlbossofsports #sportsad ♬ original sound – Emily Jane Fairs

The original ad itself has reportedly been viewed more than 33 million times, but the response trend it accidentally sparked, real women showing what their sport actually looks like, is arguably making a bigger, and very different, point than the ad ever did.

New: the backlash kept building, and more athletes joined in

In the days since, the athlete response has only broadened. British sprinter Amy Hunt referenced the ad, unprompted, in a live post-race interview with BBC Sport after competing at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship.

“Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like. Muscles. Hard work. Sweat, blood, tears.” — Amy Hunt, British sprinter

Australian boxer Skye Nicolson drew a sharper distinction:

“There’s a big difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you do sport compared to using sex to sell ‘sport.'” — Skye Nicolson, boxer

Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer told CNN the campaign is “very damaging, especially for young females getting into sport,” and Olympic 100-meter semifinalist Bree Masters posted her own competition photos captioned, “Respectfully Sydney Sweeney… This is what women in sports really look like.” UK athlete Lucy Davis, in a post liked by Florence Pugh, summed up the mood more bluntly:

“I don’t know wtf Sydney Sweeney was doing, but it’s 2026. Stop sexualizing women in sport.” — Lucy Davis, UK athlete

By Monday, according to CNN, the Instagram ad alone had racked up roughly 37 million views in four days.

Sweeney has now responded, twice, and neither response has cooled things down

Sweeney’s first response came baked into Novig’s own press materials: “The concept is simple: cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports. The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor and a playful edge.” When CNN pushed her directly on whether she wanted to address the criticism, she offered a now-widely-quoted line instead of a direct answer.

“I think that when I have an issue I want to speak about, people will hear.” — Sydney Sweeney, to CNN

Her second response said even less out loud. On Sunday, September 13, she posted a series of wordless Instagram Stories captioned “It’s game dayy,” featuring nude and semi-nude images from ESPN’s old “Body Issue” photo series, including Serena Williams, Megan Rapinoe, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, and Caroline Wozniacki alongside male athletes like Rob Gronkowski, Jason Kelce, and Karl-Anthony Towns. She never said the post was a response to the Novig backlash, but the timing made the implication hard to miss: professional athletes pose nude too, so what’s the real objection?

That framing didn’t land well with media researchers. Stephen Warren, a Northeastern University professor of communication studies who specializes in sports media psychology, called Sweeney’s Body Issue post “disingenuous,” arguing it conflates two very different things.

“[The Novig ad] is celebrating male voyeurism.” — Stephen Warren, Northeastern University

He also noted Novig could have simply hired a real female athlete to represent the brand playing her actual sport in uniform, adding that “both of those would relate a lot more to sports betting than a naked blonde bombshell.” The backlash has had a measurable cost, too. Variety reported that Sweeney lost more than 200,000 Instagram followers in the days after the ad and her subsequent response, even as the post itself continued to rack up likes.

What the statement leaves out

Fortinsky’s statement up top does most of the explaining, but two pieces of it deserve a closer look. First, how he described her while he was at it: “Sydney is an actress, the biggest movie star in the world.” That’s doing a lot of work as a factual claim. She’s talented, she’s everywhere right now, and she’s clearly beautiful, none of that is in dispute. But “biggest movie star in the world” is a marketing line, not a verifiable fact, and leaning on it doesn’t make the ad’s actual choices any less tone-deaf. A company can be genuinely proud of who it signed and still have made a bad call about what it asked her to do on camera. Those aren’t in conflict.

Second, Fortinsky was dismissive of the criticism itself.

“There are a lot of people that have feelings about Sydney as a person that predate this campaign. Working with her, we obviously expected the people who already hate her would be loud and vocal.” — Jacob Fortinsky, Novig CEO

He maintained the company has been “very happy with how positive the feedback has been overall,” a claim that sits uneasily next to the volume and specificity of the athlete criticism, much of it from Olympians and working professionals with no evident history of disliking Sweeney.

Why so much of the anger is landing on her personally, not just the brand

Some of the backlash here is aimed squarely at Sweeney, not just the company behind the ad, and there’s a real reason for that beyond her simply appearing in it: she isn’t just paid talent. She’s an equity holder in the company, and Fortinsky has now confirmed on the record that she was the driving creative force behind the campaign’s visuals and messaging. That’s a different relationship than a celebrity cashing an endorsement check for a day on set. She helped build this one, and she owns a piece of what it earns.

It’s also not an isolated incident this year. In July 2025, she fronted American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign, where a line about genes being “passed down from parents to offspring” and determining traits set off a firestorm over accusations that the ad echoed eugenics and white-supremacist rhetoric, a controversy loud enough that even the White House weighed in. Then in spring 2026, a storyline in Euphoria’s third season drew its own backlash over a widely criticized scene many viewers called infantilizing and overly sexualized. Now, a few months later, comes the betting ad. Three separate controversies in about a year, all centered on the same basic complaint: using her image, and often her body, in ways that read as exploitative or in poor taste.

None of that means she deserves the ad’s entire blame; the company built the campaign and profits from it too. But when the same throughline keeps showing up across projects she’s actively chosen and, in this case, helped create, “it’s just the brand” stops being the whole explanation. People are reasonably asking why she keeps choosing this, and it’s worth acknowledging there’s a case to be made on her side too: some commentators argue this is simply savvy “earned media,” pointing out that the outrage cycle itself, whatever else it does, keeps her name and her business ventures in the news at a scale a conventional campaign never would.

The gap this ad ignores: what female athletes actually earn compared to men

This is really the heart of why the ad landed so badly with women who actually play sports for a living. Women in sports haven’t just fought for visibility, they’ve fought for pay, for leagues that exist at all, for the basic infrastructure men’s sports have had for a century. Dressing up nudity as a “women’s sports” moment, even one the company insists wasn’t meant that way, lands in the middle of that fight at a moment when the gap is still enormous almost everywhere you look.

Basketball and soccer have had women’s pro leagues for decades now, and the gap is still measured in multiples, not percentage points. Baseball is the starkest example of all: there simply wasn’t a women’s professional league in this country for 72 years, until the WPBL finally launched this year, with a total team salary budget smaller than what a single MLB bench player makes. And there’s no real equivalent at all for American football; no women’s tackle-football league plays at anything close to NFL scale, though flag football’s Olympic debut in 2028 is the first real crack in that door. Tennis and golf are the exceptions worth noting, tennis because the majors have closed the pay gap even if the broader tour hasn’t, and golf because the LPGA is posting record purses even as the men’s tour still dwarfs it several times over.

That’s the backdrop. An ad that leans on a nearly-nude actress to represent “sport,” while women who are actually building these leagues from the ground up are still fighting for a fraction of what their male counterparts make, isn’t just tone-deaf timing. It’s a reminder of exactly what female athletes say they’re up against: being looked at instead of paid.

Sexualization has a longer, darker history in women’s sports

The backlash to this ad didn’t come out of nowhere. Female athletes have spent years pointing out that being reduced to their bodies isn’t just an occasional marketing misstep, it’s part of a pattern that has existed alongside real abuse in the very institutions meant to protect them. USA Gymnastics is the starkest example: team doctor Larry Nassar spent nearly two decades abusing gymnasts under the guise of medical treatment, with more than 200 women and girls eventually coming forward, including Olympic champions Simone Biles and Aly Raisman, both of whom have spoken publicly and repeatedly about what they went through and about the culture that let it continue for so long.

It’s not isolated to gymnastics either. A 2022 investigation led by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates found systemic sexual and emotional misconduct across the National Women’s Soccer League, implicating multiple teams and coaches over roughly a decade. Broader research on athletes has found that the large majority report experiencing some form of sexual harassment, assault, or unwanted contact during their time in sport, with women disproportionately affected.

None of this means an advertisement caused any of that, and it would be unfair to draw a straight line between the two. But it’s the backdrop athletes are reacting against when they say they’re tired of being sexualized. When a woman’s body has repeatedly been treated as something for others to look at, comment on, or exploit, in uniforms, in coverage, and in cases like Nassar’s, in the most damaging way possible, an ad leaning on that same dynamic doesn’t read as harmless. It reads as one more instance of an old pattern, dressed up as progress.

Ask yourself: what was the ad even for?

Try this test. Without scrolling back up, can you say what the app actually does? Is it a betting app? A prediction market? Something in between? Most people can’t answer that, and that’s not an accident of outrage. It’s the actual failure of the ad. When the shock value of the imagery becomes the entire conversation, the brand message gets buried under the discourse. Sweeney’s face and body become the headline; whatever company actually paid for all of this barely gets mentioned by name in most of the coverage. Fortinsky’s own metrics undercut his defense a little here too: the numbers he’s proudest of, the views, the engagement multiplier, are measuring attention to Sweeney, not comprehension of what Novig sells.

If an ad this expensive, this controversial, and this widely shared can’t get people to remember what it was actually selling, that’s not a win dressed up as controversy. It’s proof that women’s bodies still get used as bait long after the industry claimed to know better, while the product, the message, and the women it claims to celebrate all fade into the background.

It’s also a good reminder to look twice at any celebrity-fronted ad before taking it at face value: check out how to spot a fake celebrity ad for more on how brands lean on star power to get you to stop scrolling.