The reaction has been fast and furious. Female athletes, including Ariarne Titmus, who said she couldn't describe how infuriated the ad made her feel, have piled on, accusing Novig of sexualising women's sport at the exact moment it claims to celebrate it. Commentators are calling it tone-deaf. Some are calling it worse. 

But that was their plan all along. 

Novig knew exactly what it was doing 

Look at what actually happened here. A relatively unknown betting platform put its entire marketing budget behind one of the most talked-about actresses in the world, an actress who, just twelve months earlier, had already proven she can absorb a genuine controversy (the American Eagle "great jeans" campaign) and come out the other side with the client's share price up and her own career relatively unscathed. Novig hired a lightning rod on purpose, because it had already seen what the lightning does to a brand's visibility. 

Then it built a spot that does the one thing guaranteed to provoke exactly the reaction it got: undress a Hollywood star, hand her sports equipment as props, and have her tell the camera it's "not about that." Every line of this script was deliberate, written to sit right on the edge of outrage, close enough to get the reaction, safe enough that the talent's own statement (calling it "confidence, humour and a playful edge") gives everyone plausible deniability afterwards. 

The critics were never the target audience 

The brand was never trying to win over the people currently furious at it. Novig's target market, young, mostly male, sports-betting-curious, was never going to be offended by this ad. If anything, that audience is exactly who's sharing it right now, and not in protest. 

The backlash is a distribution channel. An angry post from an Olympian and a "how did this get approved" headline are doing the media buying Novig couldn't otherwise afford.  

A challenger brand in a crowded, low-trust category like sports betting doesn't have the war chest to buy its way into the cultural conversation through conventional media. Outrage is free reach, and it comes with an implicit endorsement from every athlete who feels compelled to respond, because now Novig is a topic in spaces (sports commentary, morning television) it would never have cracked on its own. 

"All publicity is good publicity" is a genuinely defensible strategy here 

I know that line makes brand-safety people wince, and there are categories and contexts where it's reckless advice. But strip the sentimentality out of it: Novig needed cut-through in a market where consumers don't need another betting app on their phone, let alone a reason to download one from a brand nobody's heard of. Cut-through was the only KPI that mattered in month one. Judged against that single metric, this campaign had already worked, probably before a single new user placed a bet. 

The uncomfortable truth for anyone in this industry is that we tend to review these campaigns against the values we wish the brand held, rather than the objective the brand was actually chasing. Novig was chasing awareness, not approval, and only one of those requires anyone to like you. 

There's still a bill, but it comes later 

Brand equity built on manufactured offence is thin and short-lived, and campaigns like this tend to trade long-term trust for short-term reach, a trade that's much easier to justify when you're a challenger with nothing to lose than when you're an established player with a reputation to protect. Especially now that LLMs will deprioritise brands based on negative sentiment. Novig can wear this now precisely because most people had never heard of it a week ago. That won't be true forever, and the next campaign won't get the same free pass. 

But this wasn't an accident. Novig backed a star with a proven record of surviving controversy, wrote a script built to provoke a loud reaction, and let the internet do the media planning for free. You can call that admirable or cynical. That's a matter of taste. Whether it worked isn't really in question.