Sydney Sweeney has a phenomenal rack. She also has a masterful way of putting a bullseye on each nipple.
I’ve been seeing a lot of (very selective) outrage on her latest ad for women’s sports. Oh sorry, I meant to say “her latest ad for a sports betting app.” The two are unequivocally not the same thing. The media literacy crisis has reached advertising, and it turns out most people can no longer tell the difference between an ad that isn’t for them and an ad that’s explicitly against them.
The backlash has been non-stop since the ad was released on September 9th, and from a brand marketing point of view, I actually think it’s fantastic. The company behind the ad is Novig, a sports betting app, and from their socials alone, it is very evident that their target demographic is largely male. But of course, we can’t forget to cater to the every-cause activists, as well as our target audience of grown (presumably straight) men who bet on sports and like boobs.
If your first thought upon reading my last paragraph was “well women can like sports too!” I have bad news for you: you need to work on your media literacy skills. I, being a woman, enjoy a good sport when the mood strikes me. I think female athletes are wickedly powerful. I also think that sex sells. And oh, how wonderful it is to understand the duality of thought.
If Novig’s target audience was heterosexual women, and they’d have used a half-naked Jeremy Allen White for the ad… Hell, I’d be hooked on sports betting by noon, and there would be far less internet backlash.
The uproar and outrage towards the ad is showcasing just a small portion of what the media literacy crisis is doing to advertising. Ads are getting good again, and companies are staying on brand with their advertising, but it almost feels as though if you want to put out an attention-grabbing ad for your straight male demographic, the apology post has to be part of the content strategy.
For about 10 years, brands have been catering to the loudest people on the internet, rather than their target audiences. We saw the beginning of this with the body positivity movement, where aspirational brands, like Victoria’s Secret, tanked their market value while trying so hard to be relatable that they completely lost the plot on the feelings that were associated with their products. When VS returned to its core “sexiness,” their stock roughly tripled over the course of a year. Not because larger people don’t wear lingerie, but because the character they were selling was someone people aspired to be again.
There is a time and a place for every type of content. Empowering, aspirational, and relatable alike. This ad by Novig is using Sweeney’s sex appeal to persuade their consumer, giving the illusion that, in caveman terms, “hot girl want me to bet on sport.”
Whether this ad was commercially effective for Novig requires different evidence, but we can be certain that it caught some eyeballs and created a cultural moment for their brand.
Sex symbols have existed through every generation; I’m glad they’re making a comeback, no matter how controversial.
So to close, I pose the question: why has society developed the belief that everything that isn’t for them is an attack on them?
