The Attention - Respect Gap

When sports broadcaster Samantha Johnson first watched Sydney Sweeney’s ad for a sports betting app, her first reaction wasn’t outrage. It was confusion, verging on laughter. “I couldn’t see the connection between her being half-naked and promoting a sports betting app,” says Johnson, who has spent two decades covering sport, including this year’s World Cup. “She looks amazing. But I just thought: what does this have to do with anything?” Then the realization landed. “This app isn’t targeted at me. This advertisement isn’t for me.”

That single insight is the cleanest way into a conversation that has otherwise generated a great deal of heat and very little clarity. And it turns out Johnson’s gut instinct was precisely correct, the data confirms she was never the intended audience at all.

Who This Was Actually Built For?

The ad ran for Novig , a sports prediction market, a federally regulated alternative to a traditional sports book, launched nationwide the month before the campaign, distinguishing itself from rivals by taking no markets on wars, deaths, or politics, strictly “just sports.” Sweeney isn’t a paid spokesperson in the conventional sense. She’s a strategic partner and equity holder, a role that grew out of early conversations about her investing in the company, and according to Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky, it was Sweeney herself who approached the company about the arrangement. The size of her stake hasn’t been disclosed.

Look at who actually populates the sports betting market and the ad’s real target becomes obvious. Sports betting is a market approaching $125 billion globally in 2026, and it is overwhelmingly male: 69% of bettors identify as male against 31% female, and men gamble on sports at nearly double the rate of women, 42.1% versus 21.5% by one measure, 28% versus 12% by another. The gap widens further at the high-risk end: nearly three in ten male bettors wager more than $500 a month, compared to roughly one in ten female bettors, and 98% of documented problem gamblers in online sports betting are male.

Novig’s ad wasn’t built for women. It was built to convert that 69% male base, and specifically the wealthier, higher-risk-tolerance segment within it. The campaign used Sweeney as the delivery mechanism rather than the audience. That is precisely the moment Johnson describes: the flicker of “she looks amazing” followed almost instantly by “this isn’t for me.” The instinct wasn’t wrong. It was the market working exactly as planned.

Fortinsky has been candid about the mechanics. Speaking to Front Office Sports after the ad went viral, he said the campaign “forces us into the national discourse”, a direct acknowledgment that visibility, not persuasion, was the objective. He also described it as a concentrated bet: rather than compete broadly against entrenched rivals like FanDuel and DraftKings, which together hold nearly 75% of the regulated U.S. market, Novig chose to spend the bulk of its marketing budget on one campaign engineered to dominate conversation heading into football season.

By that measure, it worked. The ad accumulated millions of views across X and Instagram within hours of release. The backlash was equally real, Sweeney lost more than 200,000 Instagram followers in the days that followed, but for a challenger brand trying to break into a duopoly’s market share, controversy-driven reach may be indistinguishable from success. Attention, in this model, is the currency. Whether it’s admiring or outraged matters less than whether it converts.

It’s also worth noting this isn’t an isolated move for Sweeney, in 2025 she led a campaign for American Eagle Jeans promoting ‘Great Jeans’ with a tongue in cheek reference to her biological inherited traits, drawing praise from Trump. The company’s shares rose by 30% , the largest ever-single day gain for the stock. She separately founded Syrn, a lingerie brand launched earlier in 2026 with backing from Coatue Management’s technology fund. The Novig deal isn’t a one-off endorsement, it’s part of a broader pattern of converting image and visibility directly into equity across multiple ventures, and, stoking controversy through advertising, to gain attention.

The Same Week, a Different Currency

The betting ad dominated headlines during the same window as the Under-20 Women’s World Cup, a tournament of professional athletes competing, as Johnson puts it, “for the love of the game.” The contrast is the real story. A campaign with no organic connection to sport generated more coverage, more columns, and more cultural conversation than an entire generation of women athletes did by playing at an elite level on a global stage.

This is the Attention - Respect Gap in its starkest form: attention flows toward spectacle regardless of relevance, while respect, measured in visibility, wages, and cultural seriousness remains tied to conformity with narrow standards of desirability. Female athletes are still, in many federations and leagues, without a living wage and hold multiple jobs. The uncomfortable implication, Johnson says, is that “if you want to be popular, or get some sort of respect, or get more money, you might have to show a little more skin.”

“Her Body, Her Choice” Is Not a Free Pass

One of the sharper points to emerge from this discourse is the misuse of a reproductive-rights slogan as a debate-ending maneuver. “Her body, her choice” has a specific origin tied to bodily autonomy over reproductive health, not a blanket justification for shutting down any woman who expresses discomfort with sexualized marketing. Johnson puts it plainly.

Liking the ad is fine. But the male audience using it as a weapon against other women in sport, telling them they don’t deserve attention because they don’t match a certain standard, is where it turns ugly. Samantha Johnson, Sports broadcaster

The Same Week, a Second Data Point

If the Sweeney campaign were an isolated incident, it might be easier to file away as a one-off marketing controversy. It wasn’t isolated. In the same week, an AI-generated clip circulated showing ESPN college reporter , Holly Rowe being slapped by Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian. During a press conference, Texas’s star quarterback, Arch Manning joked about the clip, he has subsequently apologised.

While the two stories may seem unconnected, there is a pattern.Working in and around sport, as athletes, broadcasters, or marketing faces, being subjected to a form of public treatment that ranges from dismissive to outright hostile, often played for laughs. Johnson connects this directly to what she sees on social media whenever female athletes are discussed: comments dismissing them as unworthy of attention because they don’t match a particular aesthetic. “The response is quite violent, quite toxic,” she says.

None of this is an argument against Sweeney’s choices, her business acumen, or her right to build a campaign around her own image and equity stake. It’s an argument about what the culture chooses to reward, and how unevenly it rewards it. A campaign built on sexualized spectacle, aimed at a market that is two-thirds male and disproportionately prone to risky, addictive behavior, generated more cultural currency in a week than an entire international tournament of professional female athletes generated in a season. That imbalance isn’t an accident of taste, it’s a pricing signal, and one that filters down into how women in sport are treated, spoken to, and paid. And because Sweeney holds equity rather than a flat fee, she profits from the strategy’s success regardless of who ultimately loses money on the platform it promotes.

Johnson is candid about having navigated a version of this tension herself, early in a two decade broadcasting career. There’s a fine line, she says, between wanting to look good on screen and not wanting to be dismissed because of how she looked rather than the work she did. It took years, and a substantial body of work, before track record did the talking that appearance no longer needed to. “Now that I’m in my forties, I’m more confident. People respect me because of my body of work.”

That, ultimately, is the gap this entire controversy with Sydney Sweeney and the Novig ad exposes. Attention can be manufactured overnight through spectacle, market data, and a well-placed equity stake. Respect for athletes, broadcasters, and every woman working in sport is still being built the slow way, and priced far too cheaply for the effort it takes.