When Pulling the Ad Became the Campaign
When I returned from Turkey a few weeks ago, I felt energized. It had not been entirely a vacation–startup work is still startup work–but it had mostly been one. I came home ready to get back to work and keep writing.
On my first day back, I needed a link to one of my amicus briefs. I clicked on the Lexicon Labs website and found that it was–according to the page now occupying our domain–“parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.” Our business website was gone. Our email went down with it.
The explanation was less mysterious than the disappearance. We were in the process of acquiring the domain through a lease-to-own arrangement with GoDaddy and had made over a year’s worth of payments, but had inadvertently missed one. We did not receive any warning from GoDaddy (they confirmed they could see no missed payment emails had been sent out), and the domain immediately reverted to its previous owner. The missed payment was ultimately our responsibility, but recovering the domain proved far more difficult than it should have been. Chad and I came away from the experience convinced that GoDaddy could substantially improve its customer service.
If you are wondering why we were using GoDaddy in the first place, the answer, in all likelihood, was due to an advertisement—the kind of advertisement for which Sydney Sweeney is now receiving so much criticism.
The year was 2005. GoDaddy was a little-known Arizona company, and the commercial web was barely a decade old. GoDaddy created a Super Bowl ad in which model Candice Michelle appeared before a mock congressional censorship hearing while a strap on her top repeatedly slipped from her shoulder. The commercial parodied both Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the previous year’s halftime show and the regulatory backlash that followed it.
Fox approved two airings. It showed the commercial once during the first half and then had a change of heart in the middle of the game; the ad proved too hot to handle. The network pulled the repeat scheduled for the two-minute warning in the fourth-quarter and replaced it with a promotion for The Simpsons. Fox did not publicly admit it, but GoDaddy claimed that the NFL played a role in the decision.
What’s better than a Super Bowl ad? A Super Bowl ad that gets pulled during the game.
When Fox retreated, GoDaddy received something considerably more valuable: a national controversy. The decision to suppress the commercial became part of the commercial. News organizations replayed it, commentators debated it, and millions of people who might otherwise have ignored an advertisement for domain registration learned the name GoDaddy.
It worked. I cannot prove that this was the commercial that first put the company in my head, but not long afterward, I became a customer. More than twenty years later, I still am.
The Immediate Backlash
More than twenty years later, the playbook is immediately recognizable.
On September 9, Novig launched its first national advertising campaign with Sydney Sweeney, who is not merely a paid spokesperson but a strategic partner and equity holder in the company. The commercial (NSFW) opens with Sweeney covered by strategically placed footballs, basketballs, and other sporting equipment. “No betting on wars or deaths and no politics,” she says. Novig is “just sports.” By the end, she is leaning topless over a pool table and explaining that viewers cannot trade on that—she “just look[s] good here.”
The reaction was swift. British sprinter Amy Hunt was among the female athletes who condemned the campaign. She later explained her objections on Good Morning Britain:
Others joined in: Olympic cyclist Sophie Capewell and four-time Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus accused the campaign of sexualizing women’s sports and diminishing what female athletes actually do. Former UCLA gymnast Gracie Kramer responded with footage of herself competing, captioned, “This is what a woman in sport looks like.” Her post received more than one million likes and inspired hundreds of similar responses.
Sweeney, in turn, shared images from ESPN’s Body Issue on her Instagram Stories, including photographs of Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe and several male athletes. The advertisement became an argument, and the argument became an advertising campaign of its own.
“I Have Never Heard of This Company Until This Morning. Now I Have.”
Major outlets are covering the story. The Washington Post published a piece. So did The Guardian, which also published this video:
It’s a fascinating conversation. Watch it. But perhaps the most interesting line comes from Lucy Hough:
I have never heard of this company until this morning. Now I have.
Yeah. Isn’t that the whole point of advertising?
I am pretty certain I had never heard of GoDaddy before 2005. And I honestly don’t remember whether I even watched the ad live. But there was so much backlash that afterward, I certainly had. That did not lead to anything immediately, but when I began looking for domain names, my brain surfaced the information I had absorbed– largely, if not entirely, because of the backlash–and I became a customer.
Hough admits as much. She’s aware of Novig now. The ad worked.
She may never visit Novig and engage with their prediction markets, but because she and so many others are talking about it, others will hear about Novig, too. Without question, some of them will join Novig and start making predictions.
And that is the broader point. I am not saying that the athletes’ objections were insincere or invalid. It means that, as a matter of marketing, those objections worked for Novig. Every denunciation repeated the company’s name, circulated its images, and invited another audience to watch the commercial and decide for themselves, ultimately planting Novig’s name into their subconscious minds.
Novig founder Jacob Fortinsky has been unusually candid about the benefit. Sweeney’s ability to attract attention, he said, “forces us into the national discourse.”
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A public-relations consultant quoted by The Guardian put it more bluntly: “Sex still sells. And the outrage, the culture war argument gets you one thing: enormous reach.”
Fox inadvertently discovered that formula when it pulled GoDaddy’s second commercial. Novig appears to have built it into the campaign from the beginning.
The Outrage Multiplier
Has the campaign worked? In fact, we don’t even need to speculate. Let’s take a look at the results:
That is less a traditional growth curve than a drag race: zero to $1 billion before most companies have finished introducing themselves; it’s the business equivalent of an AMZ.
In finance, this type of growth has a name, and it happens to be one of the sports objects that Sweeney is holding: the hockey stick. To be sure, Novig’s growth is not entirely because of Sydney, but she is undoubtedly a significant part of it:
This is what happens when a video draws 22 million views in two days.
Trading volume is not revenue, of course, and attention is not the same thing as a durable business. But for a new entrant fighting to be noticed in a market crowded with Kalshi, Polymarket, Robinhood, Crypto.com, and the major sportsbooks, the campaign has already accomplished its first objective. Millions of people who had never heard of Novig now know its name.
“Rampant Capitalism.” But By Whom?
The Guardian video refers repeatedly to Sydney Sweeney as a “rampant capitalist.” Sure. But to be clear, Sydney is not the only one riding this train. She just happens to be the one generating the most controversy.
LeBron starred in a Polymarket ad and is expected to earn more money from that ad than from bringing his talents to Philadelphia. Jeremy Piven and Jake Paul also put one out for Betr. The Beast partnered with Kalshi.
Using celebrity power is a well-known tactic. But are we sure we are not shooting the messenger? Sydney, for all the controversy she created, is a very small part of the ecosystem.
Sports gambling is the story. Sydney Sweeney was merely the most effective way, at least for this week, to get more eyeballs on Novig.
A Choice Not Yet Available in America
Across the Atlantic, Britain is confronting a question that the United States is not yet equipped to answer. Adam Roarty reported recently that the United Kingdom could revisit how prediction-market products fit within its binary-options rules, potentially opening the door for platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket. At the moment, those platforms are blocked there, even as British users increasingly find their way to them through VPNs.1
That is not the most interesting part.
The more interesting part is that the United Kingdom may have a choice that the United States does not. If the Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) relaxes its rules, it can draw a line between financial event contracts and sports or election markets. The former could call within a financial-regulation framework. The latter could require a gambling license from the Gambling Commission.
In other words: Call sports trading a financial product if you want, but if you want to offer sports markets to British customers, you may have to accept the legal and regulatory consequences of also calling it gambling.
The American fight has become almost the reverse. The platforms insist that sports event contracts are federally regulated financial products. The states insist they are gambling. The CFTC insists that states have no business deciding the question. And the companies are understandably reluctant to seek state gambling licenses, because doing so could undermine the positions they are taking in court. Novig itself moved from a state model to a federal one.
That leaves American consumers with the least useful kind of choice: an argument over labels, rather than a meaningful decision about protections. Is this product a form of financial trading? Is it gambling? Is it both? What rules apply when someone loses money? Who is responsible for making sure the answer is clear before they do?
The United Kingdom may not have solved any of those questions, but at least they are confronting them directly. Here, we are still fighting over who even gets to ask them.
Questions Remain Behind the Controversy
I will not belabor the legal question here. I have written on this subject many times. Let’s just say that I have serious questions about the legal status of the product, and little confidence that those questions will be satisfactorily answered even if the Supreme Court grants review in one of the pending prediction-market cases.
For Novig, the controversy is working double duty. It attracts enormous attention to the company while deflecting scrutiny from its product. As the world argues about Sydney Sweeney, Novig laughs all the way to the bank. But attracting attention may not even be its greatest victory. Everyone is talking about the woman advertising the product. Far fewer people are asking what the product actually is–or whether its customers understand what they are buying.
The Real Story: Financial Literacy
I get it. Debating the boundaries between speculation, investing, gambling and gaming is not as sexy as talking about Sydney Sweeney. I understand why the latter story dominated. But financial literacy is actually the ballgame.
Media outlets have rebranded the conversation as a women’s-rights issue. It is not an unimportant issue by any means, but an advertisement for a product that has penetrated deep into finance is not the right vehicle–or this controversy the right forum–for resolving it. The real story is hiding in plain sight:
I am less concerned about Fortinsky getting Sweeney onto his cap table than I am about him blurring the boundaries between finance and gambling on live television. The backlash only strengthens his platform and all but guarantees that he will have more opportunities to talk about this.
The likely result: more gambling–or trading, or whatever the American public has decided to call it–on women’s sports, and likely more threats to women whose partners play sports. We will have turned the advertisement into a women’s-rights controversy while helping to expand the product that creates the more persistent challenge.
Making Choices
You might ask: If you were in the same situation, would you not do exactly the same thing?
For better or worse, the answer is no. And I am not speculating. I am speaking from experience.
The funny thing is, I was more or less in this situation. Like Novig, we were trying to bring a sports product into the futures marketplace. Similar to Novig, we understood the value of star power–or more precisely, Chris (my business partner at the time) understood it. But there were two critical differences:
First, we deliberately moved away from a product whose legal status was uncertain and pivoted to one that was clearly within the regulatory framework; and
Second, Chris’s advertising idea was to retain Christina Aguilera and let her produce a jingle specifically for us. That was supposed to be our Super Bowl moment.
The idea made it onto the whiteboard, but never to production. The 2008 recession made sure of that. Our product was stopped at the one-yard line. No sports futures, no Aguilera.
So we tried to do our part and continue to do so. But unless the source problem is addressed–financial literacy–progress will run in reverse.
Sydney Sweeney is a story. But she should not be THE story.
The FCA’s own Perimeter Report says financial prediction-market products remain subject to its retail binary-options ban, while stating that it will consider whether to do further work on access to these products and/or clarify the regulatory perimeter. It does not announce that the ban will be lifted.