Sydney Sweeney's viral sports ad: Why do celebrity bodies keep becoming advertising controversies?

What happens when a Hollywood star, a sports betting company and a deliberately provocative advertisement collide? Sydney Sweeney has just found out — and the argument around her latest campaign is beginning to look oddly familiar.

Sweeney’s new advertisement for sports prediction platform Novig has gone viral after the actor appeared nude, with footballs, basketballs, shoulder pads and other sports equipment strategically covering her body. The campaign was designed to grab attention ahead of the US football season, but it quickly became a debate about how women are represented in and around sport.

Several female athletes, including Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus, British sprinter Amy Hunt and former UCLA gymnast Gracie Kramer, criticised the campaign. Their argument was not simply about nudity. They questioned why an advertisement connected to sport should use a sexualised image of a woman rather than focus on athletic ability, achievement and competition.

What has Sydney Sweeney said about the backlash?

Sweeney has not issued a lengthy public statement defending or apologising for the campaign. Instead, she appeared to respond on Instagram by sharing images from ESPN’s famous Body Issue, which has featured athletes such as Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey and other sports stars posing with little or no clothing. The apparent point was that nudity and sport have been presented together before, including by accomplished athletes themselves.

Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky has also defended the campaign, saying the company never intended to portray women’s sport. He said Sweeney is an actor promoting a sports-focused prediction platform and revealed that she, as an equity holder in Novig, was heavily involved in the creative process. According to Fortinsky, Sweeney approached the company and drove much of the advertisement’s visuals and messaging.

That creates an interesting question: is this simply a provocative celebrity advertisement built to attract attention, or does the use of a woman’s body in a sports context carry a different meaning in an era when women’s sport is trying to be recognised primarily for athletic achievement?

Three decades ago, India had its own version of this debate

Travel back to 1995 and the setting changes from Hollywood to Mumbai. Milind Soman and Madhu Sapre, then a high-profile model couple, appeared in a black-and-white Tuff Shoes advertisement, with nothing but a python wrapped around them.

The image became one of the most controversial advertisements in Indian advertising history. At the time, the models reportedly faced charges under the Indecent Representation of Women Act and the IPC after the campaign caused an uproar. The legal case continued for years. In 2013, a Mumbai court acquitted Soman, Sapre and the other accused, with the court holding that the advertisement did not meet the legal threshold for obscenity.

The remarkable part is how familiar the argument sounds today. Some saw the Tuff campaign as provocative advertising and a question of individual expression; others saw it as crossing the boundaries of public decency. In 2020, Soman himself revisited the photograph on Instagram and wondered how the internet would react if the same campaign appeared in the social-media era.

Then came Ranveer Singh and the magazine-cover storm

In 2022, Ranveer Singh found himself at the centre of a similar debate after appearing nude in a photoshoot for PAPER magazine. The photographs went viral, attracting both praise and trolling. The shoot inspired a meme-fest online, while a complaint was subsequently filed with Mumbai Police alleging that the photographs hurt women’s sentiments.

The controversy moved beyond social media. The Maharashtra State Commission for Women received a complaint, and Mumbai Police later issued Singh a notice. At the same time, several people in the film industry defended the actor’s decision to pose for the shoot, underlining the divide between artistic expression and perceptions of obscenity.

And this is hardly the first time an ad has crossed a ‘cultural’ line

India has seen similar arguments before. Pooja Bedi and Marc Robinson’s 1991 Kamasutra condom advertisement was considered so bold for its time that Doordarshan refused to air it. Years later, Bedi recalled the campaign, which had become one of the defining examples of provocative Indian advertising.

The difference today is speed. A controversial print advertisement in 1995 travelled through newspapers, magazines and television. Sweeney’s campaign can rack up millions of views before the first serious debate has even begun. Novig’s CEO said the advertisement had already crossed 12 million views on X and 47 million on Instagram by September 15.

So what exactly are we watching unfold when an advertisement like this goes viral?

Is it a legitimate conversation about how women are represented? Is it an example of celebrities using their bodies and image as a form of creative expression? Or is controversy itself now part of the advertising strategy?

Perhaps the most striking thing about Sweeney, Soman and Sapre, and Ranveer Singh is not that their images are identical — they clearly are not. The contexts, brands and cultural moments are different. It is that every generation seems to arrive at the same uncomfortable question in a new form: When does a provocative image sell a product — and when does the image become bigger than the product itself?

(With inputs from agencies)