As controversy swirls around Sydney Sweeney’s nearly nude advertisement for sports-betting app Novig, influencers such as Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith continue to expand their commercial businesses under the “tradwife” label. Their content appears to occupy very different cultural spaces, but both rely on a similar attention strategy: present a highly recognisable image of womanhood, invite debate and then soften or reject the label attached to it in order to preserve room for brand partnerships.
Lawrence Rosenberg, a communications strategist and media coach for corporate executives, describes Sweeney and the tradwife influencers as “two sides of the same publicity logic.” In his view, leaving some room for interpretation allows controversy to keep circulating without allowing a personal brand to be defined entirely by one political or cultural position.
Novig ad brings the debate to sports betting
Sweeney is a strategic partner and shareholder in Novig. In the advertisement, she appears almost nude, using a basketball or tennis racket to cover herself, while saying: “No war or death bets. No politics. Just you, your judgment and sports.” Novig intended the campaign to underline that its platform focuses solely on sporting events. After its release, however, some female athletes criticised the presentation as an attempt to use the female body to attract attention and said the message reduced a more complicated debate to a simple slogan.
On September 14, Sweeney posted an Instagram Story showing nude photographs of athletes, including Serena Williams, taken for ESPN’s “The Body Issue.” The post appeared to place the Novig campaign in the same visual context as athletes’ editorial portraits. On September 16, Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky said that Sweeney had led the advertisement’s central message and visual direction.
Celebrity crisis-communications adviser Lauren Beeching said the criticism did not mean Sweeney had failed to make a deliberate commercial calculation. In a 2024 interview, Sweeney said she had persuaded her parents to support her acting ambitions with a PowerPoint presentation outlining a five-year business plan. Beeching believes Sweeney may have weighed the negative response against the exposure generated by the campaign and concluded that the commercial value of attention outweighed part of the reputational cost.
This is not the first time Sweeney has used a similar approach. Her 2025 American Eagle jeans campaign was criticised for allegedly carrying white-supremacist undertones. After remaining silent for five months, she told GQ last November that she simply liked jeans and had “shot a jeans ad.” The Novig campaign also appears to have anticipated a political response: if the brand was only talking about sports, subsequent criticism could be framed as outsiders introducing political meaning themselves.
Rejecting the tradwife label while keeping the format
Neeleman and Smith have taken a different approach to labels. Both reject the term “tradwife” and have stressed that position in recent interviews. Critics argue that the immaculate kitchens, time-consuming cooking and family-centred routines they show on camera present a more traditional model of women’s roles. Off camera, however, both creators run sizeable personal businesses.
During an appearance lasting about 90 minutes on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Smith repeatedly explained that she does not place being a homemaker at the centre of her identity. She described herself as a “working mother.” At the same time, she acknowledged that her account began to grow in earnest after she adopted a passive-looking format built around cooking for her family in the kitchen, and that she has chosen to continue reinforcing that visual style.
In an interview with New York Magazine in June 2026, Neeleman said she does not actively embrace terms such as “tradwife” or “Yesteryear” when they are applied to her. “Yesteryear” is a novel about a tradwife influencer whose protagonist is transported back to the 19th century and develops a new perspective on her former way of life.
Neeleman’s farm-life content nevertheless helped put her on the cover of Evie Magazine’s November 2024 issue. The magazine describes itself as a conservative version of Cosmopolitan and has published headlines including “The Male Gaze Is Not a Hate Crime.” Beeching said the word “tradwife” now carries clear political associations, which brands take into account when choosing influencers for partnerships. For creators, dropping the label while keeping the underlying content may therefore make it easier to work with a broader range of commercial partners.
Sweeney, Neeleman and Smith have not fundamentally changed what they are selling, Beeching said; they have simply “changed the label on the can.” Cultural commentator Katie Gatti Tassin similarly argues that images can communicate more powerfully than explicit statements. Ideas conveyed through clothing, kitchens, household roles and the display of the body may be harder to sell to a broad audience when stated directly.
Engagement is rising, but attention is not revenue
The strategy is still producing measurable commercial attention. Sweeney’s Instagram post promoting the Novig advertisement received about 1.2 million likes and 54,800 comments in a little over a week. Smith plans to release a cookbook through HarperCollins in October, while Neeleman’s farm shop in Utah has drawn queues to enter.
There have also been signs of pressure on social-media reach. Sweeney has lost roughly 200,000 followers in recent days. That prompted Tassin to question how many times a creator can repeat a cycle built around a nude-image controversy followed by a public response. Beeching cautioned that generating attention does not necessarily produce sales.
For Novig, the dispute has generated substantially more discussion than a conventional sports-marketing campaign, but public data does not yet show whether that attention is translating into registrations, betting activity or long-term user retention. For Neeleman and Smith, cookbooks, a farm shop and brand partnerships offer more direct routes to monetisation. What can be established for now is that disputes over labels have expanded the reach of their content, while advertising conversion, follower losses and consumers’ willingness to pay remain separate measures to watch.