Sydney Sweeney is dominating headlines again, this time because of an advert for sports prediction platform Novig that has caused a fairly spectacular amount of debate online.

The campaign has been criticised by a number of professional female athletes, including Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus and British sprinter Amy Hunt, who argued that the creative sexualises women in sport. Whatever you make of the advert itself, it has unquestionably generated attention: The Guardian reported that it had been viewed more than 22 million times in its first two days.

But the most interesting part of the story from a personal-brand perspective isn’t actually the advert.

It’s the deal behind it.

Sweeney isn’t simply the celebrity being paid to appear in Novig’s campaign. She has joined the company as a strategic partner and equity holder. Novig’s CEO has also said that Sweeney approached the company and drove much of the creative direction behind the campaign.

That changes the conversation considerably.

Because there’s a big difference between being paid to advertise somebody else’s business and using the value of your personal brand to own a piece of what you’re helping to build.

The Personal Brand Is Becoming the Asset

For years, the traditional celebrity endorsement model was fairly straightforward.

A company had a product. A famous person had an audience. The company paid for access to that audience and hopefully sold more products as a result.

That model obviously still exists, but we’re increasingly seeing people with powerful personal brands move further up the commercial chain. Rather than simply asking, “How much will you pay me to promote this?”, the more interesting question becomes, “What is my involvement worth if this business grows?”

That’s what makes the Novig deal worth looking at.

Sweeney is contributing more than her image. According to the company, she’s involved as a strategic partner, has an ownership interest and played an active role in developing the campaign.

Her personal brand isn’t simply being used as media.

It’s part of the investment.

And you don’t need to be a Hollywood actor to understand why that distinction matters.

Your Audience Has a Commercial Value

Business owners sometimes treat personal branding as something slightly separate from the “real” business.

You post on LinkedIn because you’re supposed to. You make a few videos for Instagram. You build some followers, get some engagement and hopefully people remember your name.

But that massively understates what a strong personal brand can eventually become.

If people recognise you, trust your opinion and pay attention when you speak, you have built distribution.

You don’t have to rent that attention from somebody else every time you want to launch something.

That’s valuable.

It’s why we’ve spoken so much about personal brand visibility and brand recognition on social media at Digital Sparks. The objective isn’t simply to collect followers or generate views. It’s to build enough familiarity around your name that attention can eventually be directed somewhere commercially useful.

That might mean your existing business today.

Tomorrow, it could mean a new product, another company, a partnership, an event, a book, a podcast or an investment.

The audience stays with the person.

Sydney Sweeney Has Already Seen What Attention Can Do

This isn’t Sweeney’s first advertising campaign to turn into a huge online conversation.

Her 2025 American Eagle campaign, built around the “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” line, generated widespread criticism because of its play on “jeans” and “genes”. Critics argued that elements of the campaign carried troubling racial connotations, while American Eagle defended the campaign as being about denim.

What happened commercially is worth separating from the online argument.

American Eagle’s CMO subsequently said the campaign had helped bring in 790,000 new customers and nearly 320,000 new social followers in its first six weeks, alongside denim sell-outs and increased traffic. The wider campaign period also included a collaboration with Travis Kelce’s Tru Kolors brand, so those results shouldn’t simply be attributed to Sweeney alone.

There were also less flattering indicators. Third-party footfall data initially showed year-on-year declines at American Eagle stores following the campaign’s launch.

That’s important context because “controversy equals sales” is far too simplistic.

Sometimes controversy creates attention. Sometimes that attention helps a business. Sometimes it damages one. Quite often, you don’t know the full commercial effect until much later.

And that’s where the lesson becomes much more useful than simply telling businesses to be controversial.

Being Impossible to Ignore Isn’t Enough

There is a dangerous marketing lesson you could take from all this:

Say something provocative and watch the views arrive.

I wouldn’t recommend it.

Attention and effective marketing are not the same thing.

The Novig campaign has generated huge visibility, but there are already questions about whether people remember the company as clearly as they remember Sweeney. Analysis cited by Business Insider found Novig’s social mentions increased more than ninefold following the campaign, yet only around 4% of posts discussing the controversy actually mentioned Novig itself.

That’s fascinating from a branding perspective.

Millions of people can talk about your advert without necessarily talking about your product.

And if you’re the business paying for the attention, that’s a pretty important distinction.

The objective isn’t to become impossible to ignore at any cost. It’s to become difficult to ignore for the right reasons and by the right people.

You Don’t Need Controversy. You Need a Point of View.

This is where the lesson becomes relevant to ordinary business owners.

You don’t need to take your clothes off, start an argument or deliberately annoy half of LinkedIn.

But you probably do need to give people a reason to remember you.

Too much business content is technically correct and completely forgettable.

“Five tips for selling your home.”

“Three things every business owner should know.”

“We’re delighted to announce…”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of it. There’s just very little to attach to the person saying it.

A strong personal brand normally has some edges.

You believe something. You have experience that shapes the way you see your industry. There are things you think your sector gets wrong and things you believe customers deserve better from.

Talk about them.

That’s not manufacturing controversy. That’s having a point of view.

And there’s an enormous difference between the two.

Recognition Changes the Opportunities Available to You

This is where personal branding becomes more interesting than social media.

If Sweeney were simply an actor appearing in adverts, her commercial opportunity would largely be tied to what brands were prepared to pay her for the next campaign.

Equity changes the relationship.

Now the attention she generates can potentially contribute to the value of something she partly owns.

That’s an extreme celebrity example, but the principle travels surprisingly well.

An estate agent who becomes the recognisable property voice in their town isn’t only generating leads for this month’s instructions. They’re building an audience they could potentially use to launch an event, grow another branch, introduce a property service, attract recruits or build partnerships with other local businesses.

A founder who becomes known for a particular area of expertise isn’t simply marketing today’s company. They’re building something that can move with them.

Companies change.

Job titles change.

Products change.

A recognised personal brand can travel.

That’s why I think business owners need to stop measuring the entire value of personal branding through likes on individual posts.

There’s a Difference Between Followers and Influence

You can have a large following and very little influence.

Equally, you can have a relatively small audience that pays enormous attention to what you say.

For most business owners, the second one is considerably more useful.

If you’re an estate agent in Chiswick, you don’t need five million followers. You need enough of the right homeowners in Chiswick to recognise your face, understand what you’re good at and remember your name when they start thinking about moving.

That’s real commercial influence.

The same applies to an accountant, recruiter, mortgage adviser, agency founder or consultant.

Your personal brand doesn’t become valuable when everybody knows you.

It becomes valuable when the right people associate you with something useful.

That distinction matters because it changes the type of content you create. Instead of chasing whatever might generate the most views, you start thinking about what you want those views to build towards.

The Best Personal Brands Create Optionality

This is probably the part of Sweeney’s Novig deal that interests me most.

A strong personal brand gives you options.

It can make an existing business easier to grow because people already know who you are. It can make partnerships more attractive because you bring an audience with you. It can make launching something new easier because you’re not starting from zero.

And eventually, it can give you the leverage to negotiate something more valuable than a fee.

That doesn’t mean every business owner needs to start demanding equity in their next collaboration.

The point is bigger than that.

Attention becomes considerably more valuable when you own what the attention is being directed towards.

If you’ve spent five years building an audience and then launch your own product, the personal brand has become part of the route to market.

If you start another company, you’re not really starting from scratch.

If you partner with somebody else, you bring something to the table beyond your CV.

That’s why building a personal brand is increasingly difficult to separate from building a business.

Don’t Build Attention With Nowhere for It to Go

There’s another lesson here that gets overlooked.

If you’re serious about building your personal brand, you need to think about where all that attention eventually leads.

Followers are useful.

Email subscribers can be more useful.

Enquiries are more useful again.

Customers are what keep the lights on.

Ownership can potentially take things another step further.

This is why personal branding needs to connect to a wider commercial strategy. Your content should build recognition and trust, but there should also be somewhere for interested people to go next.

That might be your business, a service, a newsletter, a community or something you eventually build in the future.

Otherwise, you can become very visible without necessarily becoming more valuable.

The Sydney Sweeney Lesson Isn’t “Be Controversial”

It’s easy to look at Sweeney’s last couple of major campaigns and conclude that controversy is the strategy.

Maybe it is part of the calculation. Maybe it isn’t. From the outside, we can’t know that.

What we do know is more interesting.

She has an enormous personal brand. Companies understand the attention attached to it. With Novig, she isn’t simply accepting a cheque to lend that attention to somebody else’s campaign; she’s become a strategic partner and equity holder in the business she’s helping put into the conversation.

That’s a very different use of visibility.

For most business owners, the scale will obviously be smaller, but the principle is exactly the same.

Don’t build a personal brand simply because somebody told you that you need to post on LinkedIn three times a week.

Build recognition.

Build trust.

Build an audience that understands what you know and what you stand for.

Then make sure you’re building something behind it that you actually own.

Because the most interesting thing about having people’s attention isn’t how many views it generates today.

It’s what that attention allows you to build tomorrow.