Novig’s Sydney Sweeney campaign is a useful reminder that attention only works when you’re comfortable with who it attracts and who it pushes away.

Sydney Sweeney has done it again.

Her latest campaign shows her mostly nude, strategically covered with footballs, basketballs and other sports equipment, promoting Novig under the line “Just Sports.”

The ad has been viewed more than 40 million times, while online conversation about Novig jumped roughly ninefold after launch.

For a relatively unknown sports prediction platform, that is an insane amount of earned media. Suddenly, it’s not so unknown.

Image: NOVIG

So, massively successful campaign?

Um, maybe.

Female athletes including Olympic champions have attacked the ad for reducing women in sport to sexual objects at a time when women’s sport is enjoying enormous growth.

Their response became a counter-campaign of its own, with athletes posting competition footage under variations of “THIS is what women in sport look like.” 

But here’s where it gets commercially interesting.

Research firm Zappi tested the ad with 200 online gamblers. Among men, 73.4% said it made them MORE likely to choose Novig, while only 8.4% said less likely.

Among women, 42% said more likely, but a substantial 32.8% said less likely. Women now represent roughly a quarter of the online gambling market. 

That’s not a straightforward marketing win or failure. It’s a trade.

Novig appears to have created something its core male audience responds to exceptionally well while aggravating part of a smaller, but growing, market.

Brands make trades like this all the time, although rarely so visibly.

Some controversies burn hot online and barely touch the business.

Others show a wider gap between the advertising and the brand’s values, customers or partners.

Good Good Golf discovered that recently when a controversial ad led retailers to pull merchandise and reportedly cost the company sponsorship opportunities.

That’s where “all publicity is good publicity” starts to crumble.

Publicity has a value. So do customers you lose, retailers you piss off, partnerships you jeopardize and future markets who roll up the welcome mat.

Novig has another problem: most of the chit-chat is about Sydney Sweeney, not Novig.

One analysis found only about 4% of social posts surrounding the campaign mentioned the app at all.

Brand awareness increased for sure, but we still don’t know whether registrations, deposits or repeat usage followed. 

And that’s the number that’ll eventually decide whether the outrage was worth the cost of a very expensive celeb endorsement.

I’m generally in favour of brands taking risks. Safe advertising has a remarkable ability to disappear before it even gets noticed.

But if part of your brand’s value is its ethos, there absolutely is such a thing as bad publicity.

Provocation works best when the folks you alienate are ones you can genuinely afford to lose.

One of the ideas I explore in I Need That is that successful products begin with a clear understanding of who they’re for.

Provocative marketing adds another question:

Who are you willing to be against?

For Novig, we don’t have the commercial answer quite yet.

Forty million views tell us it got noticed, big time.

But they don’t tell us if the bet will pay off.

You’ve got an opinion and I want to hear it. Hit reply and tell me!

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.