Novig's 'Just Sports' ad shows Sydney Sweeney in a sports kit, strategically covering her naked body to sell a sports prediction market app – come on, admit it, you've all searched for it. It joins Pepsi's 'Wild Cherry' and Callaway's Obsession parody as ads that got us thinking 2026 is the year of the cancelled ad, and like her American Eagle campaign from last year, Sydney Sweeney has been torn apart for this new racy commercial.
However, Powerade's response, the 'Never Just Sports' campaign, adds one word and turns the whole furore into a different debate about women in sport. The Ogilvy-made campaign has been running on digital screens in New York's Times Square, directly opposite the Novig billboard, with images of women swimming and clearing the high jump, and it never mentions Sweeney or Novig; it just nicks the phrase, changes it just enough to make a difference and trusts you to remember the original – but it's also right there next to Sweeney, so it's not hard.
What interests me more than who has the better line or how clever Coca-Cola feels right now is why an ad with a Hollywood actor in a cheeky pose ended up as a row about how women are shown in sport at all, whether we really are returning to 'ads' old dirty tricks', and whether Millennials and Gen Z read the same pictures differently, because I suspect the answer is messier than one lot being offended and the other shrugging.
One word, a very different picture
Novig's idea is commercially clear: it wants to stand out as a sports-only prediction market app, unlike platforms that let you trade on politics and world affairs. Its CEO says Sweeney helped develop the campaign's creative, and that it's an eye-catching way into something few people care about (I mean, really?). The gag is that she's wearing "just sports", footballs and other kit doing the job of clothes, a play on words that's as subtle as "good jeans".
Just like American Eagle's slogan, it worked for what was needed at the time, with plenty of attention both good and bad, and Novig reporting a rise in activity on its platform: it claims first-time depositors rose more than 218% in the 20 days around the 9 September launch, and the Instagram reel passed 37 million views in four days. (Honestly, if you, like me, never felt clear on what a naked Sweeney and Novig were selling, I'd argue that alone could have driven the search.)
By contrast, Powerade's athletes skip the Austin Powers prancing-around-his-love-pad routine and use their bodies for sport. The physicality remains, shown as the result of training and competition, with no '90s lads mag revival.
Yet the bad-ad-versus-good-ad framing is too easy, because women can be glamorous without undermining what they've achieved; Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka have done just that in their careers. So what are these ads actually saying, beyond getting people to look? And who comes out on top?
Gen Z versus Millennials (again)
The easy answer is Millennials raised on lad mags and tabloids against a Gen Z fluent in social media and the language of representation, but plenty of Millennials hate sexualised advertising, plenty of Gen Z see Sweeney confidently making her own choices (she's Gen Z herself), and a fair few probably think it's ordinary attention-seeking marketing, so you can't pin a view on a whole generation.
Millennials watched brands move from traditional ads to blogs, Facebook, and YouTube, and saw influencers take over, while Gen Z grew up with influencer celebrities selling them everything from games to makeup, with brand deals and staged images all muddled together. Gen Z has its own cues for knowing when they’re being sold to (the #ad tag, the suspiciously candid photo), plus the vocabulary to call it out on the spot. Which is how the same billboard can be a knowing joke with one lot and the oldest trick with another.
So we're in a place where one person sees Sweeney owning her image and getting paid on her own terms, while another sees the old shortcut of using an attractive woman to grab attention, and both can be right, since she can have agency over her image while a brand still uses it to sell something. Powerade is selling too, using a live row to position itself alongside female sports achievement, and it's playing the same attention-grabbing game.
We've been having the same debate since tobacco ads became a thing in the 1870s, and I'm old enough to remember Madonna making a career out of it, from Material Girl to the Sex book. So what's changed?
We’ve been here with Sweeney before
Sweeney's American Eagle 'Great Jeans' campaign had already been through this, with arguments about beauty standards, race, genetics and political identity, because the "genes" pun plus a blonde, blue-eyed actor led some people to read it as being about far more than denim, and it showed how an ad can pick up a meaning its makers never intended and can't control once the internet gets hold of it. Adweek's Weissbrot called it a return of “male gaze” advertising, and many people read it as the end of the brand-purpose decade.
In many ways, that's what American Eagle can teach us about branding in the 2020s, because the Novig row is really about how women are presented in ads, here in sports, and whether sexualised imagery undermines female athletes, and whether criticising the ad is an attack on Sweeney's right to make her own choices. When Madonna did it, the provocation at least started a conversation; now polarisation turns everything into a shouting match.
Female athletes have criticised it, from Ariarne Titmus to Felicity Palmateer and Gracie Kramer; Novig has defended it and kept promoting it, and Powerade elbowed its way in with a polar opposite view, one that, let's be honest, is happy to play off the furore too, only from a different angle: women powering through the water and lifting the weight.
Reactive ads are easy
Powerade's timing has an obvious commercial angle: it chose to wade into a mess, make a point without building awareness from scratch, and the one-word swap hands journalists like me a simple way to describe the idea and write about how clever it all is.
But Powerade has a history of campaigns focused on mental and physical well-being, hard work, and training, which gives this context beyond a swipe at a rival brand. The response has landed with at least some of the people it's aimed at, too: a female athlete working in marketing wrote in PRWeek that many women in sport, herself included, greatly appreciated it.
A reactive ad like Powerade's still has to be judged as advertising, so it's fair to ask whether it gives female athletes a real platform, changes how people see their achievements, or just gets remembered as a clever troll to another saucy Sydney Sweeney campaign. The same goes for any brand taking a stand, because people are wary of companies that adopt a cause only when it becomes useful.
Powerade could have issued a statement or run a montage of sporting achievements, but instead it took a phrase with a public meaning and flipped it, short enough for a bold ad and with a second life for anyone who's seen Sweeney's butt on a billboard and Novig's pun. For brands, an empowerment slogan, a provocative image or a well-timed reply only gets you so far; what lasts is whatever holds up once the joke or shock wears off.
Will Gen Z and Millennials agree on what that is? Probably not. As a Gen X, I've seen it all before too. Move on.
