By Eric Yaverbaum, CEO of Ericho Communications
In early 2026, Novig founder Jacob Fortinsky assessed that the only thing separating his company from other prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi and sportsbook companies like DraftKings and FanDuel was brand recognition. To solve this problem, and to simultaneously announce national prediction market certification, Novig enlisted the talents of one of the world’s most famous young actors and known advertising provocateur Sydney Sweeney for a new ad campaign entitled “Just Sports.”
The campaign featured Sweeney entirely nude aside from “just sports” paraphernalia covering parts of her body while she made a verbal pitch for Novig. The ad very quickly went viral online, sparking responses from several female athletes accusing Sweeney and Novig of minimizing women’s contributions to sports. Sweeney and Novig landed at the center of a sports advertising culture war, and many stories have been written as to whether controversy may have been their intention all along. What has gained far less attention however, is how the company used virality and outrage as a cover to further normalize one of the fastest growing and most financially crippling forms of addiction, a tactic common amongst prediction markets.
Founded in 2021, Novig was named literally for what the platform offers—sports betting without the “vig”— or the cut taken on each bet by sports bookmakers. Frustrated with how sports betting platforms would ban sports bettors who became too successful, founders Jacob Fortinsky and Kelechi Ukah sought to celebrate the savvy sports bettor with a commission fee-free betting platform. How the company turns a profit is unknown—the founders claim that profits were secondary to reaching $1 billion in monthly trading volume on its platform (a figure the company has met in lifetime trading as of days ago).
In past attempts to break through saturated markets and to find favorable regulations, Novig had eras of being both a traditional online sportsbook as well as a token-based sweepstakes platform. At the start of this year, the company applied for designated contract market (DCM) certification from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the same certification companies like Kalshi and Polymarket have to operate legally as prediction markets. Five months later, Novig became the fastest-approved DCM ever. The company’s latest valuation from August is worth $500 million, and that’s before the airing of its infamous new ad.
Even after all of this rapid success, Novig is still dwarfed by the prediction market juggernauts that Polymarket and Kalshi have built. Over the past year, prediction markets have cannibalized much of the now seemingly antiquated online sportsbooks, at least via stock price. Both DraftKings and FanDuel have launched their own prediction market features for states in which traditional sports betting is still illegal. Functionally, betting on sports in a sportsbook and “trading” on sports in a prediction market seem very similar. You take a hunch that you have a certain outcome, stat, or spread, and wager money that you are correct. If you’re correct, you win and earn money, and if you’re wrong, you lose and your wager is gone. The key difference is that in a sportsbook, the odds are manually set by an oddsmaker, and in a prediction market, the traders themselves make the odds.
Notice how in Novig’s and other prediction market ads, companies rarely say that you can “bet” on their platforms, instead the call to action is to always “trade.” Betting is something anyone of age can do, but historically it often has a nefarious connotation—it’s done in dark, smoke-filled rooms, with the risk of serious consequences if a bet doesn’t hit. In recent years, more and more states have legalized sports betting, dawning the now passing age of online sportsbooks. People could place bets from the luxury of their own homes, and sports betting, as well as sports betting addiction, boomed.
Trading on the other hand, is something that seems both new and exciting as well as established and traditional at the same time. Trading is how many in America have built wealth—it’s a specialized skill. People go to school for it in hopes of building a better life. It’s done by serious business people in serious suits who take important meetings and are up to date on current events. Trading is also something that the biggest celebrities are into. Lebron James does it. Timothy Chalamet does it. And now, so does Sydney Sweeney. If you trade predictions, you’re part of an elite, learned, insider club.
These companies do not want you to associate their product with gambling. Of course, their product is different. There are no gambling addiction hotlines at the end of their ads, their product is legal everywhere and has completely different legal classifications. The issue is, the act of betting and trading are virtually the same to a layman, and just as the “house always wins,” the majority of prediction market traders do not make a profit, and the heads of these companies fully acknowledge this. Prediction markets would have you believe that they are introducing a new accessible and skill-based path to climb the economic ladder through their advertising, when in reality, they are repackaging online betting into a less regulated industry with salacious marketing.
Novig is the latest player in this nascent business, using a unique cocktail of sex, controversy, political disenchantment, and moral concern in its latest ad in hopes of slingshotting itself to the top alongside Kalshi and Polymarket. If you listen past the visuals, the ad pitch is as follows: “Think you know sports? Prove it. Novig is just sports… No betting on wars or deaths, and no politics. Just you, your takes, and sports.” Like the copy reads, unlike other prediction markets, you can only trade sports on Novig. It doesn’t market trades featuring odds of who might win the next election, what words might be said in the next State of the Union, rising egg prices, or what country the US might declare war on next. Just sports. Notably, Novig also differs from its competitors by being a 21+ platform. On Kalshi and Polymarket, you can start at age 18.
In an interview months before the airing of this ad, founder Fortinsky accused the other prediction markets of “downplay[ing] the centrality of sports to their product.” Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour recently explained that 95% of the trades on its platform last year were for sports, a figure he believes has dipped to around 66% this year. Mansour also once infamously said that his company’s long-term goal is to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” To reckon these two statements, Kalshi has to do some work to get people used to betting on things besides sports, and if Mansour is to be believed, its efforts are working.
A basic assessment of Novig’s ad will tell you who their main target audience is: straight males over the age of 21 who want to place wagers on sports. It enlisted the talents of Sweeney through an equity deal to be its apolitical spokesperson, and they could not have found anyone better to do the job. Sweeney denied awareness of any playful nods to eugenics in her American Eagle Jean ad last year. She’s gone on record stating that she’s “not a political person.” She’s the perfect person to speak to men who want to participate in the dopamine spiking activities that predictions trading offers without having to see the words “war,” “politics,” or “death.”
Do not misunderstand, it’s noble that Novig has an issue with betting money on these very real topics, but that’s likely not the reason Novig doesn’t allow that type of trading on its platform. It’s a simple business calculation: people want to bet on sports, they don’t want to be reminded of the horrors of the world around them when they do it. At the end of the same early 2026 interview and before Novig was an accredited predictions market, Fortinsky proclaimed: “Our north star is to be the largest sports betting platform in the world.” Novig’s latest campaign is just a manifestation of this vision.
