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Sweeney Ad Watch
Commentary

Somebody approved the Novig ad. That somebody was Sydney Sweeney.

This week the business press is asking who let these campaigns through. For the Novig ad, the answer is the woman onscreen: an equity partner who revised the script, chose the camera angles, and selected the music. The approval chain runs through her.

By Jude Marlow, Editor Published September 22, 2026 at 10:15 AM PST
Somebody approved the Novig ad. That somebody was Sydney Sweeney.
Photo: Raph_PH / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (Sydney Sweeney, 2025). Crimson treatment by Sweeney Ad Watch.

A pattern is becoming visible in the business press this week. The Boston Globe published a piece Tuesday asking, bluntly: "Somebody approved these ads. Who was supposed to see the problem?" The piece groups recent brand disasters together and asks a structural question, not just a cultural one. Who at the company said yes? Who is accountable when an ad ships with a problem nobody catches? It is the right question. For the Novig ad, the answer has been hiding in the Fortune reporting that everyone has linked but almost nobody has followed to its logical end.

She was the one who approved it

Fortune reported on September 18, citing a source familiar with the arrangement, that Sweeney was not a conventional talent hire. She approached Novig seeking equity before she agreed to appear, became a shareholder, and then served as an active creative partner throughout production. According to Fortune's source, she revised the script, guided specific camera angles, and chose the music. The ad was not handed to her as a finished brief. She was shaping the brief. That means the standard framing, the actress who showed up to do what the brand asked, misses what actually happened.

At a glance

The approval
Sweeney is an equity partner who revised the script, guided camera angles, and selected the music, per Fortune
The context
Novig CEO goal was to "close the gap from a brand-awareness perspective" (Fortune, Sept 16)
The athletes
Ariarne Titmus, Amy Hunt, Felicity Palmateer each publicly criticized the ad with specific quotes
The contrast
The Converse KKK imagery ad went through a full professional approval chain and nobody caught it
The caveat
The creative director attribution is from a Fortune anonymous source, not Novig or Sweeney on record

What the creative director role means for the accountability question

In a conventional endorsement, the brand's marketing team and its agency carry primary creative responsibility. The talent is a cast member. The people who should "see the problem" are the brand managers and the agency creatives who built the campaign. When Ariarne Titmus asked "how far can you put women's sports backwards in a 42-second commercial?", Amy Hunt responded with a photo of real female athletes, and Felicity Palmateer questioned how we still live in a world where monetizing a woman's body in a sports context is the move, those critiques were directed at a campaign they assumed had been made the standard way, by people who decided to use Sweeney as the object. That is not quite what happened. The person with the most public profile in the production room was also a decision-maker inside it. She is among those who were supposed to see the problem.

This is not an exoneration for Novig

To be clear about what this argument does and does not say. Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky runs the company. He told Fortune the company's goal was to "close the gap from a brand-awareness perspective," and he chose to pursue that goal by bringing in an equity partner with creative input. Novig bears institutional responsibility. The brand signed off. The company distributed the ad. The fact that Sweeney helped build it does not move any liability from the brand to her. What it does is complicate the political narrative that has formed around the controversy, the one where a powerful brand exploits a woman by making her its object. The woman in that story was in the writer's room. She helped write herself into the shot.

Compare it to Converse, where the opposite failure happened

The contrast that makes this structural is what happened at Converse. Our reporting on the Chuck 70 X campaign and its subsequent crisis playbook documents the other accountability failure: a large brand, a large agency, and a full approval chain that shipped an ad with imagery linked to lynching. Nobody in that chain was trying to cause a controversy. The ad reached its audience with a problem embedded in it that the entire professional apparatus, brand managers, agency creatives, legal review, distribution, failed to surface. That is a different failure mode. It is the failure of a system that was supposed to catch things and did not. The Novig failure, if one accepts the criticism, is the failure of a decision-maker who had the authority to catch things and may not have perceived what the audience would. Same headline question. Very different institutional answer.

Why this matters for how we talk about celebrity ad accountability

This industry cycle has built two competing narratives about Sweeney. One casts her as a powerful mogul who engineers viral campaigns from an equity position, a narrative Fortune established early and that we have documented throughout this coverage. The other casts her as an actress under pressure from powerful men, with Page Six sources suggesting agents pressured her about business decisions and various observers implying she lacks control over her own image. The "who approved this ad" question explodes the second narrative for the Novig case, at minimum. An equity partner with creative director authority over the music, script, and camera angles was the one who approved it. Whether she got the decision right is the argument worth having. Whether she had the power to make the decision is no longer in question.

Sweeney Ad Watch is an independent commentary site with no affiliation to Sydney Sweeney, Novig, Converse, Fortune, or any outlet named here. The Fortune reporting cited above is attributed to an anonymous source familiar with the arrangement, as noted in that piece. We have reported it as such, not as independently verified fact.

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Independent commentary. Sweeney Ad Watch is an independent commentary and news publication. It is not affiliated with, authorized by, endorsed by, or sponsored by Sydney Sweeney, Novig, American Eagle, Dr. Squatch, or any brand mentioned. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Coverage is editorial opinion and reporting on matters of public interest. See our editorial standards.