A Tale of Two Sydneys: Does attention hacking work?.

Nick Petty

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

In July 2025, clothing brand American Eagle released an advert featuring a double-denimed Sydney Sweeney that shocked the public, got people talking and attracted begrudging admiration from marketers far and wide.

Fourteen months later, sports prediction market Novig released an advert featuring a much less than double-denimed Sydney Sweeney that shocked the public, got people talking and attracted begrudging admiration from marketers far and wide.

Provocative adverts have long been a marketing staple, but in an increasingly polarised online world, have these latest contentious offerings worked?

In this article, we put on our SEO hats to review the data and draw lessons from Sydney Sweeney’s latest campaigns.

Jean-ethics: Sydney Sweeney x American Eagle

Dressed top to toe in American Eagle’s trademark denim, Sydney Sweeney gazes at a mirror while a voiceover says, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”.

Geddit?

The backlash was fast and fierce, and ranged from accusations of tone-deafness to, well, a lot worse. Meanwhile, American Eagle claimed 790,000 new customers, 320,000 new social media followers and sold out Sweeney’s jacket and jeans. Revenue rose a modest 2%, and the share price rose in the days that followed.

But what about marketing’s favourite buzzword: exposure? How many people were talking, and still talk, about American Eagle?

Google Trends offers a window into what internet users are thinking. As the chart below shows, relative search interest for American Eagle doubled in the weeks after the advert’s release, but by November, its usual seasonal bump was no bigger than in prior years.

This matches Fortune’s report that American Eagle’s core brand showed no sustained sales growth and that its share price had returned to roughly pre-campaign levels a year on.

In summary, the expensive campaign got short-term exposure, but the lasting impact is questionable.

(Literally) nothing to see here: Sydney Sweeney x Novig:

A disrobed Sydney Sweeney covers her modesty with various sporting implements and promotes Novig’s focus on ‘Just Sport’.

The campaign drew ire from all four corners of the public domain, from accusations of deliberate lewdness to distaste at the product it was seeking to promote: gambling.

The main contention, however, was the advert’s sexualisation of women in sport, with several high-profile sportswomen, including British sprinter Amy Hunt, condemning it for being regressive and undermining the skill and dedication of female athletes.

The ad generated seismic attention. Sweeney’s Instagram post drew more than 1.2 million likes, against fewer than 55,000 for a Polymarket ad released a day earlier featuring LeBron James. Novig co-founder Jacob Fortinsky claims that in the days after the ad’s release, first-time depositors surged by 218% and trading volume by 94%.

And as for exposure? Google Trends shows an enormous peak for Novig after the ad’s launch, with an overall increase of 5,000% compared to 2025. Naturally, attention drops in the weeks that followed, but interest remains 10-15 times above its pre-ad level.

Whether this heightened interest continues remains to be seen, but at first glance, it seems to be a highly successful campaign that launched a relatively unknown name onto devices and into bank accounts across the US.

So which Sydney was best?

American Eagle and Novig are light years apart in terms of business size and existing public awareness, so it’s only fair to compare them on their own terms.

Relative to where each brand started, Novig’s lift was about 50 times bigger than American Eagle’s and has held far better so far.

American Eagle bought a moment in the national conversation for a brand people already knew, but with little lasting business impact.

Novig bought awareness itself and a game-changing increase in attention in an emergent, volatile market.

Shock lessons

So what went so right for Novig and what went so nearly right for American Eagle?

First, Novig is a new operator. A breakout ad will have more impact than yet another campaign for an established brand. Whether this is circumstance or strategy is debatable.

Second, it’s worth understanding which audiences the adverts attracted and which they alienated.

American Eagle is a mainstream brand that pitches itself as inclusive, but the advert was seen to favour one side of the political divide. While its defenders favoured the brand, others called for boycotts. Exact numbers are hard to pin down, but the sales likely balanced out.

Meanwhile, Novig is a sportsbook aimed largely (but of course not exclusively) at a male customer base. At the risk of making sweeping generalisations, far fewer people in this audience were put off by the Sweeney ad than were attracted by it.

Third, and a small but potentially crucial point. The American Eagle advert was straightforward pay-for-play, whereas Novig offered Sweeney equity in the company and ‘creative direction’ over the ad itself. This motivates Sweeney to keep the attention coming and embeds her within the company itself, making it a clever, enduring association – “Novig is the Sydney Sweeney app”.

Final thoughts

On the evidence so far, Novig’s Sydney won: the same controversy playbook does far more for a brand nobody has heard of than for one everybody has.

American Eagle’s campaign is not to be sneered at, though. It doubled search interest and briefly lifted customer numbers and the share price. American Eagle is an established company in a highly fickle market, and it needs big ad campaigns just to keep even a sliver of public attention. In that sense, it succeeded.

We’ll likely see more of the same in the future, especially as small brands hope to break out on social media. It might not be long before we’re talking about A Tale of Three Sydneys.

And as to the overall impact of such marketing techniques? As Dickens famously put it: “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the age of pretty much anything goes, really”.

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