Women’s sexual wellness brands are still fighting an uphill battle against online censorship simply for trying to reach their target audience.
And when platforms restrict a brand’s ability to do paid advertising by censoring that brand’s content, it can make monetization feel like a Sisyphean task.
One such company is Unbound Babes, which started as a direct-to-consumer sexual wellness startup in 2012. It has since expanded beyond its DTC roots, selling its products – which include vibrators and lubricants – not only on its own site but also on Amazon and through several major beauty and clothing sites, like Ulta and Urban Outfitters.
In other words, the company has made the leap into ecommerce. But advertising those products is a different story. Most paid advertising platforms take down Unbound’s ads and content, said CEO and Co-Founder Polly Rodriguez.
Limited opportunities for paid advertising have made it “incredibly difficult” for Unbound to secure funding because investors want to see substantive advertising budgets, Rodriguez said. The company was at least able to secure some investments – about $4.7 million in total, more than half of which came from a seed-funding round in 2017 – which it used to expand its product line of sex toys and hire more employees.
As a result, Rodriguez said, it took until 2019 for the brand to become profitable by selling enough products online to offset the costs of marketing and inventory management.
Zip it
Unbound buys ads on Google and sometimes pays for ads on social media, such as through Facebook’s ad manager.
Often, though, paid ads get rejected or removed (including on Google- and Meta-owned platforms). Amazon also doesn’t allow sexual wellness brands to promote or sponsor their products on its site.
Instead, the brand tries to reach its Gen Z and millennial audience with organic content on social media, Rodriguez said. Unbound’s organic strategy helped it build up a social following – it has 270,000 followers on TikTok and 150,000 on Instagram – but from a business standpoint, “it’s really hard being a brand that has to rely on going viral and building community to monetize,” Rodriguez said.
Although organic growth certainly helps boost sales – Rodriguez said organic content on social media drives about one-third of the brand’s site traffic – growth in customer acquisition and return on ad spend remains unpredictable.
Success with organic content is “very random because [social] algorithms censor quite a bit,” Rodriguez said.
The classic workarounds women’s health brands use to avoid algorithm detection, like writing “seggs” instead of “sex,” can only get an advertiser so far. Rodriguez said Meta-owned platforms and TikTok most actively remove content with any sexual undertones.
In addition to removing content, some platforms also often restrict or suspend accounts, she said.
Like just about any other brand in this vertical, Unbound’s marketing model is “risky,” Rodriguez said, because “social media is such an important component to monetization” for DTC companies.
Some brands have lost their accounts and never gotten them back. “It’s a bit of a nightmare,” she said.
Double standards
Even more frustrating for women’s sexual health brands is the prevalence of paid ads for men’s sexual health, which include meds for erectile dysfunction and Viagra.
Take the brands Hims and Hers, for example: Hims openly markets products related to men’s sexuality, whereas approved Hers ads usually focus on mental health treatment, such as for anxiety, rather than sexual wellness.
To uncover the blatant double standard, Unbound created a fake brand this year called Thunderthrust, which presents as selling sex toys and related products for men. Unbound created a website and actually bought paid ads on social media platforms for its mock brand. In this case, “the ads went right through. No rejections,” Rodriguez said. “It wasn’t surprising, but it was infuriating.”
But, unfortunately, Unbound’s efforts to convince social platforms to make their ad policies fairer and less gendered, including through both petitions and protests, haven’t worked, Rodriguez said. Many social platforms are actually making their ad and content moderation policies stricter because of all the legal and social pressure they’re under to protect minors from seeing sexual content. (Not that it explains the clear gender bias.)
For now, censorship seems to be the nature of the beast when it comes to advertising sexual wellness products for women. But that doesn’t mean brands in this vertical can’t become profitable; it just requires a sales-oriented marketing strategy that leans on organic content – and a whole lot of patience.
