Sydney Sweeney’s latest brand moment looks like a bold celebrity ad, but the business structure behind it is the bigger story. The minute-long Novig spot, titled “Just Sports,” shows Sweeney promoting the sports prediction market while covering herself with a football and other sports gear. It has generated tens of millions of views across X and Instagram and more than 1.2 million Instagram likes.
For Novig, a sports-only prediction market valued at roughly $500 million, the arrangement sits somewhere between endorsement and startup equity. Sweeney reportedly approached the company because she wanted a shareholder role, not a one-off fee.
An equity deal with creative control
Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky told Front Office Sports that Sweeney was drawn to Novig’s exclusive focus on sports-event contracts, unlike Polymarket and Kalshi, which also offer markets on politics, culture and other topics. Novig later declined to comment on the size of Sweeney’s stake.
A source familiar with the arrangement told Fortune that Sweeney acted as a hands-on creative partner, overseeing music, camera angles, shot coverage and script revisions. That makes the campaign as much a product of her business bet as a paid appearance.
Out-attentioning a bigger rival
The timing is deliberate. Polymarket released its own celebrity-heavy ad about 24 hours earlier, featuring LeBron James, Derek Jeter, Eli Manning, Spike Lee, Emily Ratajkowski and Alexandra Daddario. Polymarket is valued at more than $20 billion and, according to one report, pays James $15 million a year under the partnership.
Yet on Instagram, Polymarket’s post drew fewer than 55,000 likes while Sweeney’s Novig post surpassed 1.2 million. Novig could not outspend its rival, so it used attention as the competitive lever.
Shruti Saini, a brand strategist and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, described Sweeney as “a competitive weapon” for the startup. Within hours, she said, one person placed a relatively unknown company in the same cultural conversation as Polymarket.
Attention is not the same as momentum
Sweeney has done this before. Her October 2024 Dr. Squatch bubble-bath ad went viral, and she later pitched a limited-edition soap made with her actual bathwater. It sold out in seconds—5,000 bars at $8 each.
But the American Eagle case shows the limits of one-time controversy. The July 2025 “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign drew criticism from some audiences who read the word “jeans” as a play on “genes.” It initially sold out denim and attracted new customers, but later disclosures showed no sustained core sales growth, and the stock returned to roughly where it was before the campaign.
Saini’s warning for Novig is that a sports trading platform risks becoming a “supporting character” in its own advertising. For marketers, the frame is simple:
- Attention is cheap if it does not convert into product usage or brand recall.
- Equity-based creator deals can align incentives, but they also raise brand-identity risk.
- Viral moments need a clear product, merchandising and message to create lasting demand.
The test for Novig will be whether this campaign becomes an onboarding engine—or just another very loud launch.
Source: Fortune
