Sydney Sweeney is at the center of a backlash over a one-minute Novig advert, and the criticism has come most sharply from women in sport. who is Sydney Sweeney in this context? An American actress whose campaign for a sports prediction app is being read as hyper-sexualised rather than sporty.
The ad makes that case in its own way: Sweeney says “sports” a lot while the camera shows her varying between states of undress. Women in sport have answered with a different picture, sharing images of what it actually looks like to be a woman in sport, which turns the campaign into a dispute over representation rather than a simple celebrity spot.
Novig and the 1-minute spot
The one-minute format matters because it leaves little room for ambiguity. Novig is presenting a sports prediction app, but the campaign’s visual language pulls attention away from the product and toward Sweeney’s body, which is why the reaction has been so fast and so concentrated among women who live the reality the ad is trying to depict.
Women in sport have pushed back with images of athletes of all abilities and levels, a response that does more than complain. It sets a direct contrast between the campaign’s sexualized framing and the everyday experience of training, competing, and being judged on performance rather than presentation.
Always and 2014
The writer’s reaction reaches back to 2014, when Always released its Like A Girl campaign, a message she says was burned into her retinas. At 17 years old, she says she cried uncontrollably in her living room in Covington, Louisiana, after seeing it, having spent years competing in myriad sports at an elite level and spending weekends at Louisiana State University sports events and Sundays watching the NFL’s New Orleans Saints.
That history gives the backlash a sharper edge. The complaint is not that an actress appeared in an ad; it is that the ad arrives after 12 years of work from women in sport to change what strength and athleticism look like, then seems to drag the image backward.
Women in sport push back
The core objection is straightforward: many women in sport see the Novig spot as ignoring their real experience and substituting a hyper-sexualised version of womanhood. In industry terms, that is a branding problem as much as a cultural one, because it asks a product tied to prediction and competition to sell itself through a portrait that its intended audience is actively rejecting.
The larger question is what Novig thought it was buying with Sweeney in this specific ad. If the aim was attention, it got it; if the aim was trust from women in sport, the reaction suggests the opposite, and the campaign now reads less like a pitch than a warning about how quickly representation can turn into backlash.
