Sydney Sweeney’s Novig ad sparked backlash. What did the broader conversation reveal?

Sydney Sweeney’s latest ad put Novig in the middle of a debate about how women are portrayed in sports. It also put the company in front of a much larger audience.

The campaign features Sweeney posing with strategically placed sports equipment to promote the sports prediction platform. Female athletes criticized its portrayal of women, bringing questions about sexualization and respect for women’s sports into the conversation.

But how much of the online response was criticism? And who was getting the attention: Sweeney, the ad or Novig?

PeakMetrics analyzed conversation across X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Threads and Bluesky to understand what people were actually saying. The findings, featured in Business Insider, show a campaign that generated substantial visibility for Novig, a largely neutral-to-favorable response toward the brand and a conversation overwhelmingly centered on its celebrity spokesperson.

The athlete backlash raised a specific concern. According to the Associated Press, Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus, sprinter Amy Hunt and gymnast Gracie Kramer were among those who criticized the campaign. Their objections centered on the work women put into being taken seriously as athletes and whether the ad reinforced the sexualized portrayals they have fought against.

Those concerns matter for a brand seeking a place in sports. They also raise a question that overall conversation volume cannot answer: does a prominent wave of criticism reflect the wider response?

In PeakMetrics’ analysis, 49.7% of posts were neutral toward Novig, 32.8% were favorable and 17.5% were unfavorable. Favorable posts were nearly twice as common as unfavorable ones, even as the campaign attracted criticism.

The tone of the broader ad conversation followed a similar pattern. Neutral commentary accounted for 42.1% of posts, followed by complimentary responses at 29.9%. Questioning posts made up 12%, critical responses 9% and humor 7%.

That does not diminish the athletes’ objections or establish how female sports audiences specifically viewed the campaign. It shows that criticism was one part of a broader response that also included praise, jokes, questions and people simply discussing the ad.

Looking at who people were talking about adds another layer.

Nearly 68% of posts focused mainly on Sweeney, compared with 21% focused on the ad and just 4% focused primarily on Novig. In a separate measure of mentions, Sweeney was mentioned 67% more often than Novig in relation to the campaign.

She also occupied the largest share of both the praise and criticism categories. Sweeney accounted for 51% of the complimentary conversation and 25% of the critical conversation. The ad itself accounted for 26% of the complimentary conversation and 21% of the critical conversation.

For Novig, that creates a more complicated picture than the overall favorability numbers alone suggest. People could respond positively to Sweeney or enjoy the campaign without saying much about the company or its product.

Explicit praise for Novig or its product was comparatively rare: it accounted for about 1% of the complimentary conversation. The brand represented 20% of the critical conversation.

These percentages describe the makeup of two different groups of posts. They do not mean Novig received 20 times more criticism than praise. They do suggest that the company played a much smaller role in what people praised than in what they criticized.

Still, Sweeney’s dominance did not prevent Novig from gaining visibility.

PeakMetrics recorded a 911.1% increase in online conversation about Novig immediately following the ad’s launch. On X alone, the brand accumulated roughly 35,000 mentions during the post-launch period analyzed.

Before the campaign, Novig averaged around 900 mentions a day on X. After launch, that average rose to approximately 5,772, or about 6.4 times its previous level. Mentions peaked above 10,000 on September 10 and remained elevated in the period analyzed.

The campaign clearly created a moment for the company. What the data does not yet establish is whether that attention will translate into product interest, new customers or lasting trust.

For communications teams, this is why it helps to examine volume, favorability and the focus of conversation together. Novig’s visibility increased sharply. The overall response toward the brand leaned neutral to favorable. Yet most of the discussion centered on Sweeney, while athletes raised concerns directly relevant to the sports community the company hopes to reach.

Each finding answers a different question about the campaign’s impact.

The next question for Novig is whether people keep talking about the company once the immediate attention around Sweeney fades, and whether that conversation gives them a reason to try the product. The ad generated awareness. Sustained interest is what comes next.