"This Is What a Woman in Sports Looks Like" — Novig, Please Sit Down

0

A prediction market built its entire launch campaign around a naked actress lying on a basketball, and somehow marketing thought "just sports" was the takeaway. It wasn't. The takeaway, delivered by actual athletes for actual athletes, was that Novig confused undressed with represented.

The math doesn't math. Novig spent a football-season ad budget to teach the internet that "woman in sports" apparently means tennis rackets covering nipples instead of, say, a backhand. Bold choice for a company whose entire pitch is "we're serious about sports, not the sleazy stuff."

The athletes were not amused — and they brought receipts.

  • Boxer Skye Nicolson drew the line for everyone: there's a difference between looking strong because you're an athlete, and using sex to sell "sport" — and Novig picked the second one.
  • Surfer Felicity Palmateer called it "very damaging," noting the ad had racked up tens of millions of views by doing the exact opposite of what it claimed to celebrate.
  • Runner Bree Masters didn't argue — she just posted her training footage and let it speak: this is what women in sports actually look like.
  • Four-time Olympic gold medalist Ariarne Titmus said watching it left her "infuriated," calling it an insult to every woman who's built a career on actual craft, not casting.

The irony tastes like a marketing meeting that forgot to invite a single woman. A company literally named after avoiding betting on "wars or deaths, and no politics" managed to stumble into a culture war anyway — not through edgy commentary, but through a photoshoot that reduced "women in sports" to a body with sports equipment strategically arranged on it. You don't need a crisis comms plan for that. You need a mirror.

 Sweeney is also now an equity holder in Novig. So this wasn't a rogue creative brief — it was a co-owned bet that sex still sells better than substance. Judging by the timeline, the market disagreed.

I've found the backlash to the Sydney Sweeney / Novig ad really powerful to watch. My Instagram feed has been full of female athletes and leaders (and a few good men) championing women in sport, and celebrating women's strength, resilience and achievement. But it's also shown just how much we still fixate on the appearance of women's bodies.




I was a competitive swimmer growing up. I loved the discipline, the training, the feeling of getting stronger and faster. But I gave it up, in part because of body image issues. Spending your teenage years in a swimsuit during the Kate Moss "heroin chic" era took its toll. Now, as the mum of a teenage daughter, this conversation really matters to me.

We are still spending simply too much time talking about how women's bodies LOOK, instead of what women's bodies can DO.

Sport teaches girls something incredibly valuable: that their bodies are instruments, not ornaments. It teaches discipline, resilience, teamwork, leadership and confidence. It teaches young women to set ambitious goals, deal with setbacks and discover they are capable of more than they thought.
And those lessons don't stay on the pitch, in the pool or on the track.

One study found that 94% of women in C-suite positions played sport, highlighting the powerful link between sport and leadership. But we also know that at the same time, body image concerns remain one of the key reasons girls drop out of sport during adolescence.

When a girl stops focusing on what her body can achieve and starts worrying about whether it is acceptable to other people, we lose far more than an athlete. We risk losing self-worth, confidence, ambition and leadership potential.

As someone who spent too much of her youth worrying about whether her body measured up, the lesson I want my daughter to learn is this:

Your value is not determined by how closely you fit any ideal, whether that's today's beauty standard or tomorrow's. Train because you love what your body can DO, not because of how you want it to LOOK.

Take up space.
Be strong.
Be healthy.
Be ambitious.
Challenge yourself.
Set goals for yourself.

And never let anyone convince you that your body exists to be judged by how it looks.

 The best content to come out of Sydney Sweeney’s new sports campaign… isn’t Sydney Sweeney’s.

If you’ve missed the discourse, Sydney Sweeney is fronting Novig’s new “Just Sports” campaign, featuring her posing mostly nude with various pieces of sporting equipment.
And female athletes are, understandably, not particularly thrilled.

Sportswomen have started responding with videos of themselves lifting, training, competing, sweating and actually doing the sport, with variations of:
"This is what women in sport look like"



And THAT is the bit I find really interesting as a marketer.

Because the original campaign has undeniably achieved attention. We’re all talking about it.
But attention and positive cultural impact are not the same thing.

A few months ago at MAD//Fest, I watched Danielle Lee from Metro Bank and Ben Bradley from England Cricket talk about their work around the Girls in Cricket Fund.
And what stuck with me was how much thought, investment and actual infrastructure has gone into moving women’s sport forward.

Not just: “Look! Women! Sport! Campaign!”

But: how do we get more girls playing? How do we give them role models? How do we support the coaches and volunteers? How do we make sure girls can actually see a place for themselves here?

THAT is brand involvement in sport.

And I think there is so much power in the women we’re now seeing at the top of it.

Take Amy Hunt.

She can love her nails, hair and makeup AND run bloody fast. She can be feminine, glamorous, ridiculously strong and win four golds.
Those things don't have to compete with each other.
And for young girls watching, I think there is something incredibly powerful about seeing that.
You can be a girly girl AND an athlete. Or you can be strong and competitive whilst still being a kick-ass lady.

Because for years, women have been fighting to create space for a different image of femininity.
Strong girlies. Sweaty girlies. Competitive girlies. Muscular girlies. Girly girlies.
And I don't think the answer is that women can't also be sexy.
Of course they can.

The question for marketers is what are we choosing to centre when we borrow the cultural currency of women & sport?

Because when female athletes are finally being recognised for their talent, strength and graft, reducing “women + sport” back down to a woman's body feels like a pretty uninteresting creative shortcut.

Ironically, though, something brilliant has come from it.
My feed is now full of female athletes showing what women in sport actually look like.
And those videos are more powerful than any brand campaign could manufacture.

Perhaps that’s the lesson.
You can buy attention.
You can provoke conversation.
But you cannot control what culture does with it.

And sometimes, the community creates the better campaign anyway.

They used a woman's body to make gambling look fun, sexy, and harmless. To an audience that's mostly young men.
You've probably seen it by now: the Sydney Sweeney ad that's all over your feed today.
And before anyone jumps in: I'm all for a woman being confident, sexy, owning how she looks. That's her call, and good on her. My problem isn't her.
My problem is what the ad actually is. Because here's what most people are missing: it's not even a sports ad. It's a gambling ad. A nearly-naked woman, draped in footballs and rackets, selling a betting app. "Just sports," apparently.
So let's call it what it is. They used sex to sell an addictive product to young people, and dressed it up as sport.
And gambling is anything but harmless. Over half of Gen Z are now moving money meant for saving and investing into sports betting. Six in ten online gamblers admit to chasing their losses.
That's two problems, stacked in one ad.
One, as an Olympic boxer put it: there's a difference between looking sexy because you do sport, and using sex to sell sport. The women who've spent their lives becoming real athletes deserve better than being reduced to decoration.
Two, it dresses up something that ruins lives as entertainment.
And here's the part I feel most, because I work with these people every day.
So many of the women I coach are already fighting a hard battle with how they look. Told their whole lives to be smaller, tighter, smoother. To fix themselves.
And then the biggest ad of the week lands and says it outright: your body is the product. Your value is how you look in it.
Not your strength. Not your health. Not the years some of them have put into becoming genuine athletes.
They're not decoration. They're not the thing you drop into an ad to sell a betting app. And every campaign that treats them that way makes it a little more normal for the next one to do the same.
"But it got everyone talking." Sure. So does a car crash. Attention was never the same as doing something worth doing.

Not the best message for female in sports

Post a Comment

Previous Post Next Post