In this op-ed, Manifest co-founder and managing director Isabel Thomson-Officer, explores what happens when attention outpaces brand preference.
Sydney Sweeney repeats the word “sports” multiple times while topless on a basketball hoop. Later, she’s on a pool table, also topless, delivering the line: “You can’t trade this, I just look good here.” The ad, which most of you reading this no doubt have seen already, is for Novig, a US sports prediction market where users trade against each other instead of a bookmaker, and it had racked up tens of millions of views within days of launching.
Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus called it “a kick in the face.” Gymnast Gracie Kramer described it as “infuriating”. Boxer Skye Nicolson called for an end to “sexualising women in sport.” There are plenty more athletes who have joined the growing chorus of those expressing their outrage. Basically there’s a close to unanimous verdict from sports stars that the ad sucks and is doing a disservice to the athletes the brand claims to be celebrating.
They’re not wrong.
But before I go deeper, I do want to touch on the murky middle before we point our pitchforks at Sweeney and Novig.
Like it or not, Sweeney is a grown woman who made a commercial decision about her own body. There’s a counterargument that says: who are we to tell her how she should and should not make her money? Women have spent decades fighting for the right to make exactly this call without a committee of opinions weighing in on whether she did it the right way.
And there’s a pointier question worth asking honestly. Would we be having this conversation if Sweeney weren’t what many would describe as “conventionally” attractive? If this were a plus-size athlete or a body-positive model doing the same shoot, would a chunk of the same commentariat be calling this “reclamation”? Even “empowering”?
The uncomfortable truth is that some of this backlash is a reaction to her specific body. A woman monetising her beauty reads, to a lot of people, as the least “brave” version of a woman owning her sexuality, even if the transaction is identical. If our standard for whether a woman “should” do this shifts with her body type, that’s not a standard. That’s taste, dressed up as ethics.
With that said, here’s where I personally keep landing.
None of that changes what the ad does in front of an audience that is consuming and not debating nuance. This wasn’t sold as a lingerie campaign where the transaction is legible for what it is. It was sold, explicitly, as sport. It takes the imagery of athletic achievement – hoops, bats, sticks, balls – and replaces “watch what her body can do” with “watch her body.” That’s the sleight of hand that matters more than the nudity itself.
I am far from what anyone would call an athlete – let alone an amateur one at that, but I do love picking up heavy stuff most days. And I do it for me. The version of me that can deadlift more than I could last month feels stronger, more capable of life, and more mine. Sure, the aesthetic result is a nice perk, but it was never the assignment.
That’s the whole point of sport, at any level. What a body can do, not how it looks doing it, and definitely not for who’s watching. An ad that borrows sport’s imagery to sell the opposite lesson isn’t a victimless piece of content just because the woman in it consented. It suggests to girls and women fighting for a fraction of the sponsorship dollars her male counterparts get, that this is how you get attention, and to young boys that this is what women are for in a sporting context: decoration first, competitor a distant second.
“Her body, her choice” and how we teach a generation of boys to view women overall let alone in sport are two very different sides of the argument. Personally, I know which one will do more damage in the long run. And as a mum to a three year old boy, it pains me that I’m going to have to have conversations about exactly this with him in the future, over and over again.
Is any PR good PR?
This is the age-old question that ultimately decides whether campaigns like this keep getting made (that and sales of course). So instead of guessing, I asked Manifest’s Cultural Velocity team to read what AI models are currently doing with Novig. Why? Because increasingly, that’s who’s actually determining which brands get remembered as credible and which become a punchline.
Firstly, it helps to understand how AI models work. I might be about to tell a bunch of you reading how to suck eggs so if so, feel free to skip ahead a few paragraphs.
Every time an AI model answers a question about a brand, it’s drawing on one of two different kinds of memory, sometimes both at once. The first is what the model learned during training – months of accumulated knowledge baked in before it ever went live. This is called Parametric Memory. It is slow to form and slower to update, so it can lag real events by weeks, even months.
The second is called Live Retrieval Memory, essentially what’s happening right now for the brand in the context of culture. It’s what the model can see when it actually looks at the internet the moment you ask it something: live pages, recent coverage, whatever’s happened in the last few days. Live Retrieval Memory updates almost instantly.
The two don’t always agree with each other, and when they don’t, which one the model leans on, and how loudly it talks, decides what a person actually hears back.
For most everyday questions, the trained-in memory does most of the talking, simply because most questions don’t need a live search to answer. But when a model is asked something that clearly hinges on current events like “Is this brand in trouble right now?” or “What’s the latest on this?”, it’s far more likely to reach for the live one instead. That’s exactly the split playing out with Novig.
You can watch the gap in real time. Ask a model about Novig with web browsing switched off and it will likely describe the brand as offering something like “better pricing, lower fees and more transparent odds,” (tested with ChatGPT September 16, 2026), knowing nothing of any campaign. This won’t necessarily hold for every single model, but it’s likely that the clean, pre-controversy brand is still sitting in canon (parametric memory), for now.
But back to the question: is any PR good PR?
The truth is it’s too early in the game to know, but it’s still fascinating to watch in real time and see how this all plays out, regardless of which side of the argument you sit on.
Novig is, right now, tied for the loudest brand in its category on the signal that actually measures noise — Momentum, where it matches the cohort ceiling alongside Polymarket, Kalshi, FanDuel and ProphetX.
It’s one of the better scorers overall on the underlying signals we use to predict whether AI models put a brand forward. And yet, in our September read, testing what AI says when it can see the internet as it stands at the present, it isn’t being recommended by AI models at all, while quieter, less talked-about competitors are.
Novig scored third of ten brands in its category on the composite Cultural Velocity score — ahead of DraftKings and FanDuel — yet appeared in 0% of AI recommendation runs. Of the five brands tied for loudest, it’s the only one at zero. Polymarket was put forward in just over half of runs, Kalshi in nearly half. Even DraftKings and FanDuel, with fame Novig can only dream of, scrape single digits.
Attention has clearly landed. Preference hasn’t followed it anywhere, yet.
And attention is, so far, all we can actually measure as at the time of writing we are not privy to whether it has increased sign ups, downloads, or how it’s impacted the bottom line for Novig.
What we do have are proxies: Novig jumped from around 50th to 11th in the App Store’s sports category rankings since August, and search interest in the brand has roughly doubled that of rivals Polymarket and Kalshi.
Sweeney, meanwhile, lost more than 200,000 Instagram followers. The diagnostic sees the same thing from a different angle: Novig’s strongest gains are in new-audience reach. The ad found people this category doesn’t usually touch. What hasn’t moved is territory: no new adjacencies, no launch cadence, nothing for the new arrivals to land on beyond the ad itself.
Being seen by new people and doing new things are different kinds of growth, and only one of them outlasts a news cycle. And the burst is still live. Momentum measures volume, not meaning. The meaning of this moment is being written right now, which gives Novig a short window to steer what the mentions say before the story sets. Moments beat drumbeats, but only for the brand that moves while the moment is still warm.
Attention is measurably up. Whether that attention has converted into money for anyone involved is something only Novig’s actual books can answer, and nobody’s opened them publicly yet. Which is the slightly unsatisfying place to leave this. No one knows yet which memory wins, and we don’t know yet whether it has led to an increase in sales.
What decides it isn’t volume but repetition: one outlet’s “sexualised sports ad” is coverage; the same phrase repeated across independent sources is consensus, and consensus is what models learn. The other thing to watch is whether the criticism stays attached to “the Sweeney ad” as a news event, or starts attaching to Novig itself. Detachable stories fade. Attached ones become how the machines describe you.
So whether “sexualised sports ad” becomes a permanent part of how the internet, and increasingly the AI answering our questions, describes this brand, or whether it fades the way most controversies eventually do, is genuinely unresolved at this point in time. We’re re-running the same read in six to eight weeks to find out, because a snapshot taken after a
controversy has already broken isn’t a verdict. It’s a photograph of one moment, without the context of a before-and-after. Perhaps by then we will have some idea of whether this has actually increased sales and sign ups for Novig too.
“Right now” however is still worth sitting with. To date, all the noise Novig generated hasn’t brought it a single AI recommendation. If that holds, the “any attention is good attention” defence does come into question.
And if it doesn’t hold?
If the controversy quietly launders into acceptance, and into revenue, the way these things often do, that’s its own answer about what we’ve decided we’ll tolerate.
Either way, the brands that will still be standing in six months aren’t the ones asking “will this get attention?” because almost anything gets attention if you’re willing to spend a woman’s body to buy it.
It’s the ones asking what they’re teaching an audience that can’t yet tell the difference between empowerment and exploitation, and building something worth being remembered for once the noise dies down.
