When controversy becomes the campaign

What Sydney Sweeney, Novig and the reaction from Olympic athletes tell us about attention, brand equity and the changing role of modern marketing teams.

There are marketing campaigns designed to sell a product, campaigns designed to build a brand and, increasingly, campaigns designed to start a conversation. Sydney Sweeney’s latest partnership with sports prediction platform Novig has certainly achieved the latter. Built around the line “Novig is Just Sports”, the campaign features Sweeney posing with footballs, basketballs and tennis equipment in deliberately provocative creative.

For a relatively new business competing for attention in an increasingly crowded sports market, the campaign has succeeded in putting Novig in front of an enormous audience. Within days, however, the advert had travelled far beyond its original media placement, generating headlines, social commentary and responses from some of the biggest names in women’s sport.

That reaction raises a much more interesting question for marketers than whether the creative itself went too far. When controversy delivers enormous reach, earned media and brand awareness, how do we decide whether a campaign has actually been successful? In an attention economy where consumer marketing teams are already being asked to do more across more channels, the answer is becoming increasingly complicated.

From advertising campaign to cultural conversation

The response to Novig has been particularly significant because criticism has not remained confined to comments sections. Olympic champions and elite female athletes have publicly challenged the way women and sport are represented in the campaign, with Australian Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus among those criticising the creative. Athletes including Lani Pallister, Bree Rizzo and Tilly Kearns have also shared their own imagery and messages highlighting strength, performance and the reality of being a woman competing at an elite level.

In doing so, the athletes have effectively created a second campaign around the first. They were not included in Novig’s media plan and were not being paid to distribute its message, yet every response, repost, article and discussion has extended the reach of the original advertisement. Their reaction has also influenced how audiences interpret the campaign, shifting the conversation away from Novig’s intended “Just Sports” proposition and towards a much wider debate around the representation and sexualisation of women in sport.

For marketers, this is perhaps the most interesting element of the story because brands no longer have complete ownership of the campaigns they launch. A marketing team can control the brief, creative, talent, media spend and launch strategy, but what happens once that campaign enters the public domain is considerably less predictable. Audiences interpret it, creators react to it, communities reshape it and journalists report on those reactions. Algorithms then amplify the content generating the greatest engagement, meaning a campaign can quickly become associated with a conversation the brand never explicitly created.

Modern marketing therefore involves managing not only the message a business puts into the world, but what happens when the world responds. That creates an entirely different challenge for the people responsible for brand, social, communications and digital strategy.

Is controversy becoming part of the strategy?

There is an uncomfortable commercial reality behind controversial advertising: attention is valuable. Consumer brands are competing for visibility across an extraordinary volume of content, with audiences moving constantly between TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, search, influencers, podcasts, streaming platforms and traditional media. Being noticed is increasingly difficult, and even beautifully produced campaigns can disappear almost immediately if they fail to give audiences a reason to react.

Against that backdrop, provocative creative has an obvious advantage. Something that generates a strong emotional response can travel significantly further than the audience a brand could afford to reach through paid media alone. People comment on it, send it to friends, share it with their own opinion attached and create reaction content around it. Publications then report on the social reaction, creating another wave of exposure. The original media investment can consequently become only a fraction of the campaign’s eventual reach.

Novig is particularly interesting in this context because Sweeney is not simply a celebrity hired to front an advertisement. She has been announced as a strategic partner and equity holder in the company, connecting her personal brand and enormous cultural reach much more closely with the growth of the business. Choosing someone capable of generating conversation on this scale therefore has a commercial dimension that goes considerably beyond conventional celebrity endorsement.

There is also precedent. Sweeney’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign with American Eagle became one of the most discussed advertising stories of 2025 after its creative generated intense online debate. Regardless of where consumers stood on that campaign, the controversy ensured that millions of people who might otherwise have paid little attention to an American Eagle advertisement suddenly knew about it.

For challenger brands in particular, that level of awareness can be incredibly difficult and expensive to replicate through conventional advertising. The question for marketing leaders is therefore becoming more nuanced. Rather than simply asking whether controversy should be avoided, brands may increasingly need to consider whether polarisation itself can form part of an effective growth strategy, and where the line sits between deliberately creating conversation and losing control of the brand narrative.

Attention is not the same as brand equity

This is where measuring campaign success becomes considerably more complicated. Reach matters, engagement matters, share of voice matters and earned media certainly matters, but none of those metrics exists in isolation. A campaign can generate millions of impressions without necessarily making its audience more likely to buy from the company behind it, while a controversial campaign can simultaneously attract criticism and introduce a relatively unknown business to millions of potential customers.

Traditional marketing funnels may have become less linear, but the fundamental commercial challenge remains the same: attention ultimately needs to create something valuable for the business. That could mean immediate revenue, customer acquisition, market share, brand recognition, community growth or longer-term brand equity. The danger comes when the attention itself becomes the objective and huge engagement figures are automatically interpreted as evidence of marketing effectiveness.

The Novig story demonstrates why marketers increasingly need to understand the distinction. If the controversy leads to increased awareness, app downloads, active users and ultimately customers, the campaign may prove commercially successful despite the criticism surrounding it. If audiences remember Sydney Sweeney and the backlash but cannot remember the company or what it actually offers, the enormous reach becomes much harder to value.

Strong marketing measurement therefore requires a much broader understanding of performance than counting views, likes or press mentions. The question is not simply how much attention a campaign generated, but what happened because of that attention.

Marketing is becoming a judgement role as much as an execution role.

Marketing in an algorithm-led attention economy

The wider context is an advertising environment increasingly shaped by algorithms that reward interaction. Strong emotional reactions naturally create engagement, whether those reactions are positive or negative. Consumers comment because they love something, but they also comment because they dislike it. They share campaigns they agree with and campaigns they strongly disagree with, while creators can build entire pieces of content around responding to someone else’s advertising.

For brands, this has changed the economics of attention. Provocative creative can effectively generate its own distribution network, with consumers, creators, athletes, commentators and publishers doing much of the amplification themselves. The original campaign becomes the starting point for a much larger ecosystem of content, and the brand can benefit from levels of visibility that would otherwise require an enormous paid media budget.

That does not mean every consumer business should pursue controversy. Brand positioning, customer expectations, category, reputation and commercial objectives all matter, and what works for a disruptive challenger brand could be disastrous for an established business built around trust. What it does mean is that marketing teams increasingly need to understand how cultural conversation, consumer psychology and platform mechanics interact with commercial strategy.

The strongest marketers are therefore looking beyond the question of whether people will see a campaign and thinking carefully about what audiences are likely to do once they have seen it. That distinction is becoming increasingly important as brands compete not only for impressions, but for conversation.

Celebrity partnerships are becoming commercial partnerships

The Novig campaign also highlights how dramatically celebrity and creator marketing has evolved. The traditional endorsement model was relatively straightforward: a brand paid a recognisable person to appear in its advertising and borrowed some of their fame, credibility or desirability in return. Increasingly, celebrities and creators are becoming investors, founders, advisers and equity partners, meaning their involvement in a business can extend much further than appearing in campaign imagery.

That can create a significantly stronger partnership. When a celebrity has a financial interest in the company’s growth, their audience, influence and personal brand can become genuine commercial assets rather than simply rented media. The relationship can feel more authentic and the celebrity has considerably more incentive to support the company beyond the original campaign.

However, the relationship works both ways. The company also inherits part of the conversation surrounding that individual, making talent selection a much broader strategic decision. Marketing teams need to consider audience alignment, credibility, cultural relevance and reputation alongside reach, while also understanding how a celebrity’s existing public image may shape perceptions of the brand.

When the audience becomes part of the media plan

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the Novig story is that consumers themselves have become a powerful media channel. The female athletes responding to the campaign illustrate this particularly well because their posts are not conventional advertisements, yet they have become an important part of the campaign ecosystem and influenced how thousands of people encounter and interpret the original creative.

This creates both enormous opportunity and considerable complexity for marketing teams. Community management once sat relatively far downstream in the marketing function, but reaction happening across comments, creator communities and social feeds can now fundamentally change the direction of a campaign within hours. Social listening consequently becomes much more than monitoring mentions. It provides strategic intelligence about how a brand, campaign or product is being interpreted in real time.

Marketing teams need to understand what is being said, who is driving the conversation, whether sentiment is shifting and whether responding would improve the situation or simply amplify it further. Sometimes the right decision will be to engage directly, while at other times it may be to clarify the message, adapt future creative or allow the conversation to run its course. Making those decisions requires commercial judgement and cultural awareness alongside technical understanding of social platforms.

What this means for the marketers consumer brands are hiring

Stories such as Novig are particularly relevant to the hiring market because they demonstrate just how much the remit of consumer marketers has expanded. Businesses still need specialists across brand, performance, CRM, ecommerce, content, social and digital acquisition, but increasingly they also need people capable of understanding how those disciplines interact. This is already reflected in the way consumer brands are structuring marketing, digital and ecommerce roles.

A performance campaign can affect brand perception, an influencer partnership can become a PR story and a single piece of social content can create both customer acquisition opportunities and reputation challenges. The boundaries between marketing functions are becoming less distinct, particularly within fast-growth consumer businesses where teams are often expected to move quickly and operate across multiple channels.

This makes commercially minded marketing talent increasingly valuable. Strong candidates need to be able to look beyond impressions and engagement and understand what marketing activity is doing for customer acquisition, retention, revenue and longer-term brand value. They need to understand data without losing sight of the audience behind it, while recognising that short-term performance and long-term brand building do not always pull in the same direction.

That shift can already be seen across the consumer market. As investment flows into ambitious premium brands, businesses are strengthening teams across marketing, ecommerce, commercial and digital functions to support the next stage of growth. Our recent look at where investment is driving growth across the consumer sector shows how quickly new commercial opportunities can translate into new requirements for specialist talent.

The continued growth of AI will make that judgement even more important. Producing competent marketing content is becoming faster and cheaper, and many of the executional elements of campaigns can already be automated or accelerated significantly. What remains much harder to automate is deciding what a brand should say, why it should say it, whether it is culturally relevant, how audiences may interpret it and whether the resulting attention genuinely supports the commercial strategy.

As we explored in Marketing Careers in 2026, employers are increasingly looking for candidates who can combine channel knowledge with creativity, judgement and commercial thinking. The Novig story is a timely demonstration of why those qualities matter.

Knowing which attention is worth having

Whether Novig ultimately benefits commercially from the Sydney Sweeney campaign will be determined by considerably more than the number of headlines or Instagram reactions it generates this week. The more useful lesson is what the campaign tells us about the environment in which consumer brands now operate.

Attention can be bought, earned and provoked, while increasingly it can also be generated and redistributed by audiences themselves. One creative decision can move rapidly between advertising, social media, PR and wider cultural debate, creating reach on a scale that would once have required a substantial media budget. At the same time, that reach gives brands less control over how their message is interpreted once it enters the public domain.

For consumer businesses, the answer is unlikely to be avoiding creative risk altogether. Brands that never challenge conventions or take risks can struggle to build relevance in crowded categories, particularly when competing against challenger businesses designed to move faster and communicate differently.

The more important question is whether a business understands the risk it is taking and whether that risk supports what it is ultimately trying to achieve. That requires marketing teams capable of balancing creativity with commerciality, data with cultural awareness and short-term attention with long-term brand value. In a market where almost anyone can generate more content, the competitive advantage may increasingly belong to the marketers who know which content is worth creating in the first place.

The right marketing talent does more than generate attention.

Consumer Additions connects ambitious consumer brands with exceptional talent across marketing, brand, digital, ecommerce, CRM, creative and commercial functions.

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