A month ago, almost nobody outside the sports betting industry had heard of Novig. This week, it’s one of the most talked-about startups in America, and it didn’t spend a cent on traditional advertising to get there.
Novig is a sports prediction market, a platform where people trade contracts on sports outcomes rather than place traditional bets, competing against much larger rivals like Kalshi and Polymarket. Founded in 2021 and valued at roughly $500 million after a $75 million funding round earlier this year, it was still a niche name in a crowded field. Then it released a 58-second ad called “Just Sports,” starring actor Sydney Sweeney, and the entire conversation around the company changed within days.
The ad, and why it worked as attention, not persuasion
The commercial shows Sydney Sweeney in various states of undress across a series of sports poses, football, tennis, baseball, with sports gear covering her rather than clothing. It sparked immediate backlash from female athletes and sports commentators, who argued it reduced women in sports to a marketing prop rather than celebrating their achievements. Several Olympic and professional athletes spoke out publicly against it, and the ad became a genuine flashpoint in an ongoing debate about how women are depicted in sports marketing.
For Novig, the business outcome looks very different from the public relations one. The company’s post sharing the ad on Instagram has pulled in more than 60 million views, and its X post has passed 13 million, a reach far beyond anything the company’s previous posts on either platform came close to. Novig jumped from around the 50th spot in the App Store’s sports app rankings to 11th within days of the ad going live.
The detail that matters more than the view count
The most telling number in this whole story isn’t a view count at all. According to social listening data from Peak Metrics, Novig’s brand mentions across X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Threads, and Bluesky jumped more than ninefold after the ad launched, but only 4 percent of those posts actually mentioned the Novig app itself. The other 96 percent were about Sweeney: her body, her choices, her history of provocative campaigns.
That’s an unusual trade for a company to make deliberately. Novig didn’t just buy attention, it bought a controversy that primarily elevated its spokesperson’s public profile rather than its own brand recognition. Whether that converts into actual users placing trades on the platform is a separate question from whether people are talking about it, and it’s one prediction markets are notoriously hard to verify from the outside, since most don’t disclose user growth or trading volume publicly.
Sydney Sweeney isn’t just the face of this campaign, she owns a piece of it
What separates this from a typical celebrity endorsement is the structure of the deal itself. Novig’s CEO, Jacob Fortinsky, has confirmed that Sweeney is a strategic partner and equity holder in the company, not simply a paid spokesperson, and that she personally drove much of the ad’s creative direction. Fortinsky told Front Office Sports that Sweeney approached Novig about the partnership because of its narrow focus on sports specifically, unlike competitors such as Polymarket and Kalshi, which also run markets on politics, culture, and global events.
That equity stake changes how the ad should be read. This isn’t a company renting a famous face for thirty seconds. It’s a business co-owner making the loudest possible pitch for a product she has a direct financial stake in growing.
The competitive backdrop nobody’s talking about
Novig’s campaign didn’t launch in isolation. In the same week, Polymarket released its own celebrity-studded ad featuring LeBron James, Derek Jeter, Spike Lee, and several other names, reportedly paying James alone as much as $15 million a year for his involvement. A separate platform, Betr, ran a campaign with actors Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier. Against that backdrop, a comparatively small startup with one controversial ad captured a disproportionate share of the public conversation, arguably more than campaigns with far bigger names and far bigger budgets.
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