Bet on Boobs

Before this campaign, we had never heard of Novig. Now we know what it does and we’re writing an entire article about it. Novig’s CEO Jacob Fortinsky has said Sweeney “forces us into the national discourse”, which makes it difficult to argue with the strategy. Great advertising for Novig? Absolutely. We noticed because everybody noticed. That was the point.

The more interesting question is what it says about the way we still sell sport. For all the knowingness of the campaign, the central idea is extraordinarily old-fashioned. Beautiful woman. Very little clothing. Sporting equipment. Male audience. We’ve been here before.

And look, we get that too. We don’t want Glorious to become a publication that produces an outraged essay every time somebody does something provocative. There is already quite enough of the internet permanently offended by something, and an equally exhausting corner waiting to dismiss any criticism as woke, prudish, humourless or whatever the buzzword is this week. Sometimes provocative advertising is simply very effective advertising. Sometimes a woman in her knickers is simply a woman in her knickers. We are not interested in policing either.

But we are interested in what sport chooses to show us, because sport is sport. Women, men, athletes, fans, advertising, culture. None of it exists in a separate universe. This campaign is very obviously aimed at young men who like sport, trading and betting, the so-called bro market, but the images used to sell sport to that audience still become part of the culture everyone else occupies. (And remember what can happen when brands try too hard to advertise to that audience. See Callaway x Good Good’s recent appalling decision to publish an advert depicting a man shoving a female golfer to the ground over a golf club. Read our piece on how crappy creative is ruining the fun here. Although, to be clear, Just Sports isn’t crappy creative. It is well executed, self-aware and appears to tick almost every box Novig wanted it to. We’re talking about it, after all.)

There is another reason that young male audience matters here, which is what Novig actually sells. Most of us understand sports betting in fairly traditional terms. You put some money on the football, a horse at Cheltenham or who scores first on Saturday afternoon. But prediction markets have taken the basic idea of betting on what happens next and expanded it into something altogether stranger. On some platforms, people can now put money behind predictions about elections, what politicians might say, wars, military action and even celebrity deaths. If you are thinking WTF, yes, this is actually a thing.

And this is precisely the distinction Novig is selling in Just Sports. Forget death, doom, politics and the rest of it. Their pitch is simple: sports. That is why Sweeney keeps saying it. In a prediction-market world increasingly willing to put a price on almost anything that might happen next, Novig wants to be the place that sticks to the pitch, court, track or ring.

What this new market ultimately does to our relationship with sport is a much bigger conversation. Gambling has been around forever, but prediction markets are turning an ever-growing number of sporting moments and possibilities into something to trade. For some people that is entertainment. For others it is considerably less benign. That is an argument for another day, but it does make it rather funny that a supposedly new way of interacting with sport has arrived via one of the oldest ways imaginable of advertising it to men. New market. Same tits.

So, if you’ve made it this far, chances are you fall into one of three camps. You’re from Novig, in which case hi. We’d never heard of you before this campaign and have now written an entire article about you, so congratulations, we have inadvertently become part of the media plan. Good bet on Sydney. You’re Sydney Sweeney, in which case keep going. If everyone is determined to talk about your body, you may as well keep sending them the invoice. Or, like most people who find their way to Glorious, you care about women and sport and how the two are represented. Keep questioning what you see, not because everything needs to offend us or because women need to make choices we collectively approve of, but because expecting more interesting, complicated and varied representations of women around sport is progress in itself. And perhaps that is where we land. Sydney can be empowered. Novig can have made a brilliant advert. We can still think the imagery is reductive. All three things can be true.