Sydney Sweeney is ‘Wrong’. Megan Thee Stallion is ‘Right’. Are we all hypocrites?

LinkedIn wouldn’t let me post about these two ads. Too much flesh, apparently. The irony of having a restricted post about a marketing campaign on a business platform isn’t lost on me. If you want a brief summary of how confused we all are about this, there it is.

Here are the two ads.

Sydney Sweeney for Novig, the US sports prediction app. Nude. Alone. A basketball hoop in a dark room. We all know this one by now. 

Megan Thee Stallion for Gymshark, the British activewear brand. Clothed, just. Dancing. A bright gym, her whole crew around her.

A quick look at the social comments circling about both and the same argument comes round again and again. It’s the same thing. Celebrity, body, sex sells. 

If you’re outraged by one ad but cheer the other, people will say you’re a hypocrite. 

It’s a fair challenge. 

One is bad. One is good. But is it?

Strip away the lighting and the wardrobe budget and yes, both ads use the body. Neither brand was being subtle. But the more interesting question isn’t what’s on screen. It’s who it’s for.

Novig is selling sex appeal to men. It sits in a murky category that’s male dominated and divisive by design. Nobody at Novig signed off a nude Sydney Sweeney and then gasped when the internet got cross. The outrage was part of the media plan. Wind up everyone else and win the audience you actually want. It’s a textbook challenger move. The backlash was a calculated trade-off for breaking through a crowded market. Mission complete.  

Now let’s look at Gymshark’s collab with Megan Three Stallion. It is selling confidence to women. Fitness, empowerment, and someone with real gym credibility bringing her people into the brand’s world. Critics have been quick to say it sexualises the gym to make a quick buck. Others see a woman completely comfortable in her own body, in a space that hasn’t always made women feel welcome.

Same tool. Different job.

This is where the hypocrisy charge gets interesting, because I think it’s aimed at the wrong target. The real double standard isn’t between the two ads. It’s in how we, as an industry, judge advertising at all.

We judge it as i.f we’re the audience. We aren’t.

Marketers love a comments section. We love to ride the same wave as everyone else. Part because it makes us look like we know what we are talking about. We see the hate and assume the campaign has failed and quickly reword someone else’s LinkedIn criticism. But the question that people need to ask is, if the people tearing your ad apart were never going to buy from you, why should their opinion count?

The man furious about Megan Thee Stallion was never buying Gymshark leggings. The woman appalled by Sydney Sweeney was never placing a bet on Novig. Their outrage is real, but it isn’t commercially relevant. It’s just noise. Loud, viral, quotable noise. And quite often it’s free reach.

What about the people who do matter? Both ads seem to land with the audience they were made for. The men Novig is chasing aren’t the ones writing think-pieces. And Gymshark had a stroke of luck most brands would kill for. Three days before its campaign dropped, Shane Gillis used his SNL monologue to say women at the gym now “dressed like whores”. Gymshark didn’t plan a reply, and didn’t need to. Its ad turned up and did the job for it: a woman with real gym credibility, dressed exactly how she likes, dancing in a bright gym with her crew around her. To the women Gymshark is talking to, it didn’t read as objectification. It read as a two-fingered salute.

Marketers like to be liked. Great challenger brands don’t need to be. They’re built on being loved by some and loathed by others. Lose your nerve and you end up in the safe, sanded-down middle, offending no one and exciting no one.

None of this is a free pass. “Our audience loves it” has excused plenty of lazy, harmful work. (Mine included but more on that another time). There’s a line between provoking and punching down, and brands still have to own which side of it they’re on. Putting the audience first doesn’t mean there are no consequences.

But it does mean being honest about who you’re talking to and being brave enough to ignore the people you’re not.

So, are marketers hypocrites? A bit. We cheer the ads that flatter our values, condemn the ones that don’t, and call it strategy. The better question isn’t “is this ad good or bad?” It’s “good or bad for whom?”

Answer that and the comments section gets a lot quieter. In your head, at least.