Sydney Sweeney’s ad puts a risky new industry in the spotlight

Actress Sydney Sweeney knew exactly what she was doing when she posed semi-naked for an American sports prediction platform, drawing widespread condemnation from female athletes. So did Novig, the company behind the salacious advertisement, practically unknown before deliberately launching itself into the middle of a social media outrage cycle.

Sweeney and Novig are a perfect match. The actress has distracted from a promising Hollywood career and immense mainstream popularity with a campaign that is designed to spark outrage. Her 2025 campaign for budget outfitter American Eagle, which highlighted her “great jeans,” was accused of promoting eugenics, and generated considerable social media backlash.

Now, she has emerged as the latest public face of a growing industry has flourished by skirting the outer limits of taste and operating in a gap in the law.

“Sydney first came to us as an investor with an interest in prediction markets,” Novig’s co-founder and chief executive Jacob Fortinsky wrote on LinkedIn last week.

“She’s now also a strategic partner who helped shape the creative and served as the face of our first major brand campaign”.

It’s no surprise that Novig’s latest viral ad was launched to coincide with the start of the National Football League’s season. After the American Eagle spot, Sweeney is clearly advertising catnip for a particular type of red-blooded Middle American male, the type who drives a truck, drinks beer, voted for Trump at least once. He watches College Football and UFC, not Euphoria.

And he’s also the type of guy to get around prediction markets, effectively online platforms that allow users to buy and sell contracts based on the outcome of future events as varied as the winner of the World Cup final, to when Donald Trump will launch his next airstrike against Iran. Over the past two years, the biggest players in the space, Kalshi and Polymarket, now respectively valued at $US40 billion ($56 billion) and $US21 billion ($29 billion), have soared in popularity and become major cultural forces in the United States, first bursting onto the scene during the 2024 US Presidential Election.

If you think these platforms look like gambling with another name, you’d be right. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then a duck it probably is. But so much savvy innovation is finding novel ways to disguise your duck as a goose.

Such is the case for prediction markets in the United States, where they are legal under federal law because they are considered financial exchange services, regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as contract markets. Because users bet against each other, rather than “the house,” companies like Kalshi say they are not operating casinos.

Here in Australia, those companies are treated as illegal unlicensed offshore gambling platforms, with local access restricted. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has warned that punters who use them won’t have local consumer protections.