Sydney Sweeney's Ad for a $500 Million Betting Startup Beat a $20 Billion Rival's Campaign

In September, sports-prediction-market startup Novig released a minute-long video called "Just Sports," featuring Sydney Sweeney nude or partially nude and covering herself with a football and other sports gear, posted to both X and Instagram. It quickly became one of the most talked-about ad campaigns of the year, pulling in tens of millions of views across the two platforms combined.

The numbers stood out most in comparison to a much bigger rival. Sweeney's Instagram post for Novig topped 1.2 million likes, well ahead of a competing celebrity campaign from Polymarket that had launched just 24 hours earlier and drew fewer than 55,000 likes on the same platform. The gap is notable given the difference in scale between the two companies: Polymarket is valued at more than $20 billion, has close to 2 million followers on X, and reportedly pays LeBron James $15 million a year for his involvement with the platform.

Novig, by comparison, is valued at roughly $500 million, a fraction of Polymarket's size. The company has positioned itself differently within the fast-growing prediction-market category, focusing exclusively on sports-event contracts rather than following rivals like Polymarket and Kalshi into markets built around politics, war, or culture.

Sweeney's involvement with Novig goes beyond appearing in its ad. According to CEO Jacob Fortinsky, Sweeney approached the company about investing and became both an equity partner and the campaign's creative director, weighing in directly on decisions like music selection, camera angles, shot coverage, and script revisions rather than simply showing up for a shoot.

The campaign has also reignited a debate that followed Sweeney's earlier American Eagle "great jeans" ad, over how women are used and sexualized in advertising, with critics arguing Novig's campaign leaned into that dynamic even more directly than the denim ad had. Whatever the reaction, the underlying business lesson is hard to miss: a startup worth a fraction of its largest competitor generated dramatically more attention from a single video than a rival with far deeper pockets and a marquee athlete endorsement.