Naked woman in an advertisement and the dystopian nature of predictive markets

Sweeney appeared in an advertising campaign titled “Just Sports”, which could just as well be a clip from a porn film, but is something else – an advertisement for Novig's prediction market. The actress poses nude with a baseball bat, a rugby ball plays the role of her bra, and as a bonus, we get a pun using balls – balls and testicles.

This mixture of old-fashioned sexualization in a grotesque sauce had to explode, and so it did. The state of the internet after the advertising eruption looks as follows: feminists – angry, female athletes – even more so, men – various, some quite outraged, others – delighted, because a nude Sweeney is a hot Sweeney.

“It's the only ad I’ve willingly searched for.”

“Every time Sweeney appears in an ad, she sets back women's progress by 20 years” – I read in comments under feminist analyses. There’s something in the whole drama that is far more outrageous than Sweeney being Sweeney.

Cynical bang against feminists

It might seem that we’ve already done our homework on misogyny, and images of naked women advertising anything are locked away in stuffy garages of backward uncles. Nothing could be more wrong.

Today, the people responsible for Novig can grab Sweeney by the hands and jump around happily. Just a joke, they don’t need to invite her to a circle – Sweeney is already a strategic partner and co-owner of the company, which makes the ad even more meaningful. Until recently, few people knew what Novig was, and now almost everyone in the West does.

The debate over whether Sweeney made a personal decision because it’s her body and her choice, or whether she damaged the image of women in sports, is a pot full of gold coins for the company. It’s hard not to get the impression that from the very beginning, it was all about that: drama, noise, chaos. In traditional advertising, a brand would want to create the impression that the product is interesting and useful, but in Novig’s ad, you just need to think: “Oh, wow, what a sick shit?” The company's advertising campaign is no different from a provocative post on X by a teenage conspiracy theorist, who replies to every comment with: “Can you hear the howling? Excellent.” The discussion around Sweeney emphasizes her individual, questionable choices, but what’s actually much worse than a sexualized naked woman is the dystopian functioning of prediction markets.

Novig operates on the principle of well-known companies like Kalshi or Polymarket, where you can bet on many things, for example, on ethnic cleansing, only it focuses on future sporting events. It sounds like a sports bet at a bookmaker, although the company hides behind an investor’s veneer and business language aimed at Super Entrepreneurial Players. The difference between a bookmaker and a prediction market seems mainly linguistic – ultimately, you still lose money. A bookmaker is at least honest – you bet whether a team will win, and that’s it, you can walk away. Prediction markets expect users to take a position in a contract settled depending on the outcome and blah blah blah – basically the same, but as if a copywriter finished university with a basic knowledge of finance.

Novig distances itself from gambling associations with hands and feet, situating itself in the gray area of law. The fact that nude Sweeney joined this tangle made the feminist debate part of the company's promotional campaign.

Queen of rage bait?

Sweeney is extremely effective at monetizing attention, referring to topics that frustrate people within the first second of watching the ad. It’s like the opposite of organizing a fundraiser for sick cats or dogs – there’s no way that something so sad and cute could make anyone angry.

Disagreeing with something online in terms of generated traffic is no different from supporting it. The algorithm doesn’t recognize what drives it. We’ve experienced this with Hugo Lennon, who despite posting pictures with neo-Nazis and numerous anti-immigrant, Facebook-breaking content, still hasn’t lost monetization from Meta. From the algorithm’s perspective, an ad with Sweeney must be worth sharing, since six days after publication, it was shown over 46 million times on Instagram alone (as of September 15, 2026).

On the internet, feminist outrage and male attention are exactly the same – fuel for generating hundreds of thousands of comments, reels, dramas, discussions, and thus a method for continuous advertising. It’s just as CEO Jacob Fortinsky of Novig envisioned, who first revealed that “we need to better educate the broader public about Novig, we plan to be much more aggressive in this area over the next few months,” and then admitted – “Sydney attracts the audience very well, draws attention to herself. In a way, this forces us to enter the national debate.”

It’s a company that – according to its profile – bet on its own scandal with little risk, because at worst, the strange ad will be just a strange ad, and at best – an ad people won’t be able to stop talking about.

Bathwater aftermath of Sweeney

Sydney, who a year ago annoyed people with racist jeans, has one more interesting ad-drama to her name – it started with drinking water from a bathtub in which Jacob Elordi bathed.

The scene is from the film Saltburn – Oliver (Barry Keoghan), fascinated by Felix (Jacob Elordi), is intoxicated by the water in which his crush bathed. The internet absorbed this scene, spitting out memes, gadgets, and jokes, and Sweeney turned this craze into her own product. Last year, she collaborated with Dr. Squatch, resulting in a limited edition of natural soap for men – Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss, supposedly containing real water from the actress’s bath.

At that time, some women reacted with outrage, which in turn angered Sweeney herself, because what is this – it was funny while we discussed Elordi’s water, but there are no jokes about a woman’s water anymore?

It’s hard not to get the impression that Sweeney is a troll who consciously uses controversy to build her own narrative and marketing strategy. So maybe instead of shouting at the cloud on which the nude actress drifts, it’s worth looking at the one that should really concern us: the cloud of addictive prediction markets, where betting on the outcome of a match is sold as investing, and users’ emotions are an effective way of monetization.

The post Naked woman in an ad and the dystopian nature of prediction markets first appeared on Krytyka Polityczna.