Fine. We’re talking about Sydney Sweeney.
I put this one off because the internet has spent the better part of two weeks doing what it does best: yelling at each other about a woman in an advertisement. There have been think pieces. There have been response videos. Professional athletes got involved. Everyone appears to have selected a position.
I figured we had this covered.
But this is a gaming-marketing column and Sydney Sweeney just got mostly naked for a prediction market, generated tens of millions of views, pissed off a bunch of professional athletes, and introduced a very large number of people to a company they had probably never heard of. It’s too in our lane to ignore.
And when I first saw Novig’s “Just Sports” campaign, my immediate reaction was: Oh, they know exactly what they’re doing.
Nobody is surprised
At this point, putting Sydney Sweeney in a provocative advertising campaign and being surprised when the internet loses its mind would be like putting Mentos in Diet Coke and then calling a meeting about the foam.
There was Dr. Squatch and the limited-edition soap made with her bathwater. Then American Eagle’s “Great Jeans” campaign became its own cultural event. Now Novig. I’m personally hoping she does commercial HVAC next.
But this is where I think the conversation around these campaigns gets a little silly. We keep reacting to rage-bait marketing as though the rage was an unfortunate side effect. It wasn’t.
These campaigns go through creative teams, executives, lawyers, agencies, budgets, and approvals. Someone knows exactly which image is going on Instagram. Someone knows what the headline says. Someone knows what people are going to say about it.
And in this case, Novig has been pretty open about what it wanted. CEO Jacob Fortinsky said the company was trying to close the awareness gap with Kalshi and Polymarket and wanted someone who could “grab the attention of the public.” He also said they expected people who already disliked the campaign’s star to be “loud and vocal.” So I think it’s fair to say the reaction wasn’t exactly an unforeseen development.
Whether intentionally provoking people is good for culture, good for women in sports, or morally gross is a different conversation. Plenty of people are having it.
I’m interested in the business decision. Because rage bait has become a marketing strategy.
Anger has incredible distribution
Google searches for Novig jumped 1,100% compared with the previous month. PeakMetrics found online conversation about the company increased 911% immediately after launch. Those are the numbers I care about.
Because the genius, or horror, depending on how you feel about all of this is that people who hate your campaign will distribute it for you. They repost it to complain. They send it to friends. They make response videos. News outlets write about the backlash. Other people respond to the response. Then someone writes a column about the whole thing. Hello.
At some point the distinction between your audience and your critics gets a little blurry. Everybody is helping with reach. That is an incredibly tempting proposition for a brand trying to become famous quickly. There is, however, a problem.
Nearly 68% of the conversation PeakMetrics analyzed focused primarily on the celebrity. Another 21% focused on the campaign itself. Only 4% focused primarily on Novig.
So the internet absolutely took the bait. I’m less convinced it ate the Novig part.
Being famous adjacent
That 4% gets at the risk of this whole strategy.
You can manufacture a cultural moment. You can dominate social media for a week. You can get news coverage you could never afford to buy. And somehow your brand can still end up standing three feet behind the thing everyone cares about.
This happens with celebrity marketing all the time, but rage bait makes it even easier. The controversy becomes the product. People aren’t discussing what makes Novig different. They’re discussing the ad, whether they hate it, whether everyone else should hate it, and whether the people who hate it are overreacting. Great for distribution. Less useful for differentiation. And Novig needs differentiation.
Sportsbooks remain inconveniently alive
Prediction markets have received so much attention lately that you could be forgiven for assuming sportsbooks are currently packing their belongings into cardboard boxes and asking if anyone wants the office Keurig.
They are not.
Eilers & Krejcik Gaming projects regulated sportsbooks will take about $31.7 billion in NFL handle this season, compared with $8.4 billion in prediction-market “handle analog,” its comparable measure for prediction-market activity. Roughly 79% versus 21%.
Prediction markets have become a serious competitor incredibly quickly. But Novig has to fight for customers against sportsbooks and fight for recognition against Kalshi and Polymarket at the same time.
Being forgettable is probably a bigger immediate threat than being disliked. That makes an aggressive awareness play pretty easy to understand. It also makes the 4% number harder to ignore. Because once you’ve successfully interrupted everyone, you still need to tell them why they should choose you.
Not everyone was mad, either
There was real criticism. Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus, British sprinter Amy Hunt, gymnast Gracie Kramer, and other female athletes criticized what they saw as the sexualization of women in sports.
But social media can make 500 extremely angry people feel like civilization has convened an emergency session. The broader sentiment data was considerably less dramatic.
PeakMetrics classified 49.7% of posts about Novig as neutral, 32.8% as favorable, and 17.5% as unfavorable. So I don’t think “people were mad” tells us much about whether the strategy worked. They were supposed to react. The reaction was part of the distribution.
Congratulations, you went viral
This is where rage-bait marketing gets tricky.
Going viral can feel suspiciously similar to accomplishing something. The dashboards look incredible. Search is up. Mentions are up. Your CEO is being interviewed. Your social team hasn’t slept since Tuesday. But attention is a resource, not an outcome. What did you do with it?
If you’re going to intentionally provoke an audience, know what you want that attention to do once you have it. Know where you’re sending people. Know what you want them to understand about the product. Know why they should choose you after the internet finds something new to be furious about on Thursday.
Because it will.
I still want to see Novig’s registrations, funded accounts, acquisition cost, conversion, and retention. Those numbers will tell us a lot about whether this particular bet paid off. But we don’t have to wait for them to understand the strategy.
Nobody accidentally rage-baits their way through multiple rounds of approvals and into a national ad campaign. Novig wanted attention. It got attention.
The more interesting question for every brand watching is what you plan to do after everyone stops yelling.
