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Sydney Sweeney has figured out how to make the male gaze pay

The actor knows the value of her image and has become adept at turning sexualisation into money, influence and ownership.

Sydney Sweeney may be an actor but she is the hottest person in advertising right now. 

There are few things the internet enjoys more than a woman with agency being controversial, and Sweeney seems to have understood how to turn that rather depressing fact of modern life into a remarkably effective business strategy. She’s challenging the familiar feminist outrage template.

Her latest venture is a sports-betting advertisement for Novig in which she appears almost entirely naked, using footballs, basketballs, a tennis racket and other sporting equipment to cover herself while various sports play out around her. The campaign has prompted a backlash from female athletes, who have objected to the use of a woman’s body to sell a product ostensibly about sport. 

The athletes have a point. Women in sport have spent decades trying to persuade audiences to look at what their bodies can do rather than simply how they look. It is hardly surprising that some of them bristle at an advertisement that reaches for one of advertising’s oldest formulas — sexy sells — while borrowing the vocabulary of sport. 

But there is another side to this story. 

Sweeney has become extraordinarily good at understanding the attention economy that is built around looking at women, and at making that economy work for her.

She was not just a face for the Novig ad. She is a strategic partner and equity holder in the company, and has reportedly been involved in the partnership from the beginning. What The advertisement has done for the company is classic MBA school stuff.  Before this, most people would probably have struggled to name the company. 

And you don’t have to admire........

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