Sydney Sweeney’s latest ad campaign has done two things at once: tanked her Instagram follower count and earned her an unlikely defender from inside the adult content industry.
The campaign, for federally regulated sports-prediction platform Novig, features Sweeney fully or partially nude (it’s hard to tell) across a 60-second spot, covering herself strategically with footballs, basketballs, a soccer ball, and a hockey net while promising the app is strictly “just sports” — no politics, no wars, no world events. Sweeney isn’t just the face of the campaign; she’s a strategic partner and equity holder in Novig, so her financial stake goes far beyond a typical celebrity endorsement deal. In her own statement explaining the concept, she called it “a fun idea” built to “cut through the noise” with “confidence, humor and a playful edge.”
The internet, predictably, had a lot of opinions about both the campaign and Sweeney’s explanation. Social Blade data shows Sweeney’s account initially gained roughly 50,000 followers in the campaign’s first three days, before losing 136,848 in a single day and another 68,000 the day after, with a net loss of over 150,000 followers. The sharpest criticism came from female athletes, who focused specifically on what they saw as the sexualization of women’s sports rather than the nudity itself. Retired Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus didn’t hold back: “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” she wrote, calling it “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft” and asking pointedly, “What is this teaching the young men and women of today?” Fellow Olympic swimmer Brianna Throssell posted her own training and race footage captioned, “Respectfully Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sports looks like.” Sweeney responded to the backlash by posting more campaign content (one Instagram post got 1.1 million likes) and sharing ESPN Body Issue covers featuring nude athletes on her Story, an implicit argument that nudity and athletic legitimacy aren’t actually opposites.
That’s when Skylar Mae, a US-based OnlyFans creator earning more than $1 million a month, stepped in to offer a nuanced take. “Sydney Sweeney knows exactly what she’s doing,” Skylar said. “She is the 2020s Pamela Anderson… Men love women and they love sports, so you can’t really go wrong combining the two. Then you add sports betting and it’s basically three of men’s favourite things in one ad.” Skylar’s praise focused on the craft of the campaign (the marketing instinct and attention-grabbing execution) but was not a blanket endorsement of the campaign’s message. “Whoever is paying Sydney to do this is absolutely going to be bankrolling off it,” she said.
Skylar drew a line at the product being sold, not the method of selling it. “The part I don’t agree with is using women and sex appeal to entice men to gamble, because so many people have gambling problems,” she said. “If it was just a sexy sports campaign, I’d 100 percent approve. The marketing is genius, I just question what they’re using it to promote.” That’s a different critique than what the athletes were making, focusing less on whether sexualizing sports is degrading, more about whether that same persuasive power becomes ethically murkier when the product on the other end carries real addiction risk.
Skylar’s broader point extends past this one campaign, and it’s worth taking seriously: mainstream brands, in her view, are increasingly borrowing strategies adult creators have understood and monetized for years. “Adult creators are marketing experts,” she said. “Look at the revenue OnlyFans brings in every year, or what some of the biggest creators are making. Clearly, sex appeal is what people want to see. We know how to grab people’s attention and, more importantly, turn that attention into revenue.” Coming from someone who entered the industry in college specifically to support her parents and now earns seven figures monthly, she seems to know what she’s talking about.