10
Loading video...
By Marni Rose McFall
Reporter
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Sydney Sweeney’s follower count has rebounded after an initial 200,000-follower drop following criticism surround her recent Novig ad.
The 29-year-old actress has often cast herself in a starring role in the culture war in the past year, with appearances in adverts drawing both the awe and ire of the American public.
This latest ad featured a mostly nude Sweeney, pretending to play and posing with various pieces of sports items.
Read More on News
“Just sports,” Sweeney says in the commercial that first aired last week.
Novig is a sports-focused prediction market that was founded in 2021 and is now valued at around $500 million.
Backlash to the ad was not immediate but swelled slowly in the days after the advert was released, before exploding.
Female athletes said that it was sexualizing women’s sport.
Four-time Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus said she was “infuriated,” asking how society could still be “monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport.”
Amy Hunt, a British sprinter, looked into a BBC camera after a race and said, “This is what women in sport look like. Muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, tears.”
Social media videos with the tagline “I absolutely fking hate Sydney Sweeney’s new sport ad,” accompanied by footage of women’s sporting competitions, quickly amassed millions of views online.
Newsweek has contacted a representative for Sweeney via email for comment.
...
The Backlash Over the Ad
Newsweek reviewed analytics data on the tool Social Blade to look at how Sweeney’s social media following has fluctuated since the Novig ad was released.
Overall, Sweeney has lost an average of 118,000 followers over the past 14 days.
On Wednesday, September 9, the day that the advert was released, she gained 2218 followers.
The next day, she gained 37,000 followers. On September 11, she gained 9,637 followers and then on September 12, she gained 3989.
Then the tide changed.
On September 13, as the backlash to the advert began to go viral, she lost 136,848 followers.
The following day, she lost 66,446 followers. That comes out to a loss of 203,294 followers in a 48-hour period.
But Sweeney has quickly rebounded.
The Bounce Back
As of reporting on Wednesday morning, she has gained 102,936 followers in less than 48 hours, over September 15 and September 16.
Sweeney has fast become one of the most talked-about stars in her generation.
Part of this has been down to high-profile adverts that have ignited public conversation, for better or for worse.
In July of 2025, Sweeney and the denim company American Eagle came under fire after she appeared in an ad campaign for the brand.
The campaign has the tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” which drew backlash on social media and sparked a discourse about racism and eugenics.
That fallout got so big that the White House responded, with Communications Director Steven Cheung describing the backlash to the ad as “cancel culture run amok.”
Following the fallout over the advert, it was revealed that Sweeney is a registered Republican Party member.
The backlash was swift and dominant before ultimately dwindling.
It could be that a similar situation is playing out this time around, but on an even quicker time scale.
What's The Impact of Courting Controversy?
No matter what people are saying about Sweeney, they’re looking at her.
Searches for Sweeney overtook “Donald Trump” and “Iran war” last week, with “Sydney Sweeney sports ad” becoming the most popular search term over the past seven days.
This controversy is driving visibility for Sweeney. But what will the long term impact of that look like?
Newsweek spoke to Americus Reed, the Whitney M. Young Jr. Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Reed pointed to a danger of "controversy dependence."
"Once provocation becomes the primary engine of relevance, ordinary visibility begins to feel insufficient," he said. "It resembles inflation: each new controversy purchases less attention while carrying more reputational risk."
"Celebrities are not merely entertainers anymore; they are identity objects," Reed said.
Looking at whether controversies can produce fatigue in audiences, Reed said "absolutely."
But in his view, the consequences could be greater, terming it "identity foreclosure."
"Instead of being perceived as an actor, entrepreneur, fashion figure, or evolving cultural personality, the celebrity becomes a predictable symbolic instrument," he said. "A culture-war identity can be commercially potent because it gives audiences a clear side to join. But it can also become a kind of symbolic prison."
"The strategic question for Sydney Sweeney is therefore not simply whether controversy is making her more famous. It clearly keeps her visible. The question is whether every new controversy increases her share of attention while reducing her share of identity. That is the paradox: she may become more culturally unavoidable while becoming less culturally usable," Reed told Newsweek.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Daniel Orton, Geoffrey Rowland and Emma Lee-Sang
Update 9/17/26, 5:12 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Americus Reed.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines