Sydney Sweeney’s second Novig ad mocks rival prediction markets

Sydney Sweeney posted a second Novig ad to Instagram on October 11, continuing the “Just Sports” campaign the sports prediction market launched on September 9. The 30-second spot keeps the same visual approach as the first, Sweeney posing with sports equipment while wearing little to no clothing, but this time the jokes are aimed directly at competing prediction markets rather than just promoting Novig’s own product. “There are grown men making spreadsheets to bet on what color underwear I’m wearing,” she says, before moving into sharper material: “insider trading on dictators dying,” “armies of bots manipulating it all,” and someone “sitting in a bathroom stall betting their 401k on a war.” The line that ties it together is the tagline itself: “And then, there are just people who trade on sports.” According to Covers, the post drew close to 650,000 Instagram likes within 24 hours.

The first ad’s backlash hasn’t gone away, it’s picked up a notable new voice. Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus and rugby player Sofie Fella both criticized the original campaign as disrespectful to female athletes, and actress Sharon Stone, who had defended Sweeney’s earlier American Eagle ads, took a different position this time, telling People that Sweeney should “take responsibility” for her choices and framing her own stance as support for the women who’ve actually built careers in sports rather than used them as a backdrop. Novig has stuck to one line of defense throughout: Sweeney isn’t claiming to be an athlete, the campaign is a collaboration with an actress, and the company has said it has “enormous respect for female athletes and the continued growth of women’s sports.”

Powerade joined the conversation from the other side, running its own parody spot built around the tagline “Never Just Sports,” a direct jab at Novig’s framing rather than a neutral rival ad. None of this friction has cost Novig anything commercially, quite the opposite. Co-founder Jacob Fortinsky has credited the original ad with a nearly 94% jump in trading volume and a 218% surge in first-time depositors in the weeks around its launch, and the company’s valuation has since quadrupled to $2 billion on the back of that attention. Whatever the second ad costs Novig in continued criticism, the first one already proved the trade-off works in the company’s favor, and nothing about this sequel suggests that calculation has changed.