Sydney Sweeney has done it again.
Just when it seemed like the fervor surrounding her risqué ad campaign with prediction market Novig had died down, the actress doubled down with a new ad that is just as eye-popping as the first.
The video, which was posted to her Instagram account Sunday morning amassed over 300 likes in two hours, opens with a close up of her wearing nothing but Novig branded underwear to promote the company’s “Just Sports” campaign.
“There are grown men making spreadsheets to bet on what color underwear I’m wearing,” Sweeney quipped in the opening seconds of the ad before rattling off various controversial markets that other prediction market platforms offer.
“There’s insider trading on dictators dying and armies of bots manipulating it all,” she continued. “There’s someone sitting in a bathroom stall betting their 401K on a war. And then, there are people who just trade on sports.”
Novig’s “Just Sports” campaign kicked off a firestorm of controversy that had many women athletes furious that the ad reduces women’s role in sports to their physical appearance.
Others, like conservative commentator Megyn Kelly argued that the ad was par for the course and that sports have been sold to men using sex, “since the dawn of time.”
Novig benefited greatly from the back and forth, boosting its valuation from $500 million earlier this year to $2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sweeney, who is also a partner with Novig in the campaign, has seen her own popularity rise despite the backlash to the ad.
In this latest ad, Novig is clearly taking aim at its biggest competitors, Kalshi and Polymarket, which both offer the types of markets Sweeney is referencing in the ad.
The two prediction market behemoths — Kalshi was recently valued at $40 billion and Polymarket at $21 billion, according to reports — have drawn criticism for offering markets that can be easily manipulated.
The most notable incident happened earlier this year when an Army officer involved in the operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro made over $400,000 using insider information to place wagers at Polymarket.
Kalshi and Polymarket are also at the forefront of a legal fight from states across the country to force prediction markets to be regulated like other gambling companies.
Prediction markets are currently regulated exclusively by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which opened the pathway to make them legal in all 50 states.
How that legal fight plays out over time will certainly impact Novig in the long term, but it seems clear that in the short term the company and Sweeney are more comfortable creating controversy online than in the court room.
