The advertising industry has repeated the formula for decades. From perfume campaigns to fashion magazines, the female body has often been used as a commercial tool: to attract attention, create desire, and ultimately make a product memorable. But in 2026, is this formula still as effective as it once was? The recent controversy surrounding actress Sydney Sweeney and sports prediction platform Novig raises a more complex question: if sex still attracts attention, does it necessarily still sell?

In September, Sweeney appeared in a Novig advertisement promoting the American sports  prediction platform. The campaign shows the actress in various states of undress, using sports  equipment: footballs, boxing gloves, a basketball hoop, to cover her body. Throughout the  advertisement, she repeats that Novig is about “sports,” rather than politics, war, or other  subjects. From a purely advertising perspective, the strategy is hardly revolutionary. Sexualisation  is an efficient way of capturing attention. It generates curiosity, provocation, and, above all,  visibility. In the digital economy, where thousands of advertisements compete for a few seconds  of attention, controversy itself can become a valuable commodity. The campaign quickly went  viral, reaching millions of views and generating extensive media coverage. But visibility is not the  same thing as persuasion. And this is where the campaign becomes particularly revealing.

The controversy did not primarily come from people objecting to Sweeney being attractive or  sexual. It came largely from female athletes who argued that the advertisement reduced women’s  relationship with sport to their bodies. Four-time Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus questioned  why women’s bodies were still being monetized and women’s sport sexualized. Other athletes  responded by publishing images and videos of themselves competing, training and performing,  under messages such as “This is what a woman in sport looks like.” The distinction matters.  There is a difference between a woman being sexualized while practicing a sport and a woman’s  sporting identity being represented through sexualisation. In the first case, sexuality may be part  of an individual’s self-expression. In the second, it can become a commercial shortcut: the sport  is no longer the attraction: the female body is.

This is particularly striking because women’s sport has itself undergone a cultural transformation.  Female athletes today occupy a much more visible place in popular culture, while audiences  increasingly recognize their performance, discipline, and physical strength as valuable in their own  right. The Novig campaign therefore arrived at a moment when the traditional advertising gaze is  increasingly being questioned. The paradox is that the advertisement may have succeeded  precisely because it created disagreement. It attracted enormous attention, but much of that  attention concerned the campaign itself rather than the product. The question then becomes: can  a campaign be considered commercially successful simply because everyone is talking about it?

This controversy also points to a broader transformation in advertising. For a long time, brands  could rely on shock, glamour, or sexual appeal to generate attention. Today, consumers are  increasingly exposed to the values behind a brand: inclusion, authenticity, empowerment,  environmental responsibility, representation or social responsibility. This does not mean that  sexualized advertising has disappeared: far from it. The success of campaigns built around  attractive celebrities demonstrates that physical appearance and erotic appeal remain powerful  forms of attention. But their effectiveness is no longer automatic. The same image that once  generated desire can now generate criticism, particularly when it appears disconnected from the  product or from the values of its audience. This may explain why the Novig advertisement  produced such a strong reaction. The campaign did not simply sexualise a celebrity, it placed that sexualisation within the symbolic universe of women’s sport. Athletes could challenge the  representation by offering another one: not women as bodies displaying sports equipment, but  women as athletes displaying skill, endurance, and competitiveness. There is also an important  distinction between attention and engagement. Advertising has always sought to be noticed, but  digital platforms have made attention easier to measure and controversy easier to amplify. A  provocative campaign can accumulate millions of views without necessarily creating trust in the  brand. In an environment where consumers can immediately comment, parody, criticize, or  challenge an advertisement, the audience is no longer passive.

The question, then, is perhaps not whether sex still sells. It certainly still attracts attention. The  more interesting question is whether attention alone remains enough to sell.

Sydney Sweeney’s Novig campaign suggests that the answer is becoming more complicated. Sexualisation can still be a powerful advertising mechanism, but it increasingly operates within a cultural environment where consumers, and particularly women, are willing to contest the  representations offered to them. Perhaps the advertising formula is therefore changing. Sex may still sell, but values increasingly determine whether people want to buy into the story behind it.

– Emma Sevestre