Prediction Market Ad Blitz Gets Backlash

The NFL remains opposed to partnering with prediction markets, but that’s not stopping platforms from trying to capitalize on the start of the season.

Ahead of Wednesday night’s NFL kickoff, Polymarket launched an advertising campaign featuring LeBron James, Derek Jeter, Eli Manning and a host of other athletes and celebrities. Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier reunited to recreate the spirit of their former HBO show Entourage in a commercial for the new “super app” from Jake Paul’s Betr, which allows users to trade on prediction markets, play social casino games, and more (Betr’s event contracts are powered by Polymarket). And Sydney Sweeney is nakedly promoting Novig, using basketballs and footballs to cover herself in a racy ad.

The audacity of the ads comes straight from the prediction-market playbook. Each spot has drawn significant online attention, and in many cases that attention has been negative. Perhaps the most prominent response was to the Betr commercial, which was initially released via social media post from Piven, who wrote “I found my boy…” and tagged Grenier and Betr. Despite a mostly positive reception online, Entourage creator Doug Ellin responded to Piven’s post with ire. “I think it’s pretty damn obvious I didn’t write it. My god,” he wrote in one post. “I have zero positivity” watching the ad, he said in another, adding, “This is trash and theft. Period.”

“We appreciate Doug watching the ad and helping promote it,” a representative for Betr tells Front Office Sports.

The company says it was “excited to bring Jeremy and Adrian back together, appearing as themselves. Creating that kind of unexpected cultural moment with two amazing actors was exactly what we wanted for Betr 2.0.”

“We’re really proud of how the spot came together, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, generating nearly 10 million organic social views in less than 24 hours,” Betr says. “We had a lot of fun making it, they had a lot of fun making it, and people seem to be having a lot of fun watching it.”

It’s unclear whether the ad with Piven and Grenier will air on linear TV, although a source familiar with the matter tells FOS the commercial “and its cutdowns” will be distributed “widely across a mix of channels” throughout the NFL season. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, Piven’s tweet had 4.7 million views, 1,900 retweets, and over 17,000 likes.

The Polymarket partnership with James made a major splash when the NBA superstar teased it over the weekend. On Tuesday, the full ad was revealed; it features Jeter, Manning, Richard Sherman, Sue Bird, Spike Lee, Reggie Bush, Rajon Rondo, and others. Posts about the ad from James, Jeter, and Manning were all received somewhat negatively, according to Brett Dashevsky, co-founder of social media analysis company Siftsy.

“Lots of backlash around the gambling tie-in, ‘sellout’ comments and people questioning why athletes this wealthy and influential are promoting it,” Dashevsky wrote on social media.

James, whose 55 million X/Twitter followers dwarf Piven’s 1.9 million, has received 15.6 million views, 1,200 retweets, and 7,400 likes as of Wednesday afternoon. 

Polymarket declined to comment on how many users have signed up for its platform since the James ad came out.

Novig’s sports-focused prediction market may have been the boldest commercial of all. Sweeney, who is an equity partner in Novig, appears naked in the ad but covers her private parts with a variety of sports-related objects. The top comment on a Reddit thread about the commercial, with 12,000 likes, says, “So this is super fucking gross.” The next most popular comment, with 5,200 likes, says, “Maybe I’m being dramatic but I feel like this is helping to set humanity backwards.”

Roughly seven hours after the commercial first went up, the post from Novig—which has 40,4000 followers on X/Twitter—had racked up 1.1 million views, 925 retweets, and 7,4000 likes.

Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky tells FOS there’s more content coming, including a responsible- trading commercial.

“There’s no beating around the bush about the types of consumers in this space, and who we are as a company,” he says. “You know, we’re really trying to embody this sort of ‘no BS’-type mindset.”

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