Women’s Ads Are Still Being Censored–But Brands Keep Pushing Boundaries

When the billboard went up across London, its creators at agency BBH knew it would provoke a strong reaction. The bold line read, “Cancer won’t be the last thing that f*cks me,” across a close-up image of a woman’s naked torso. 

The ad was part of a campaign from nonprofit GirlvsCancer addressing stigma surrounding cancer and female sexuality. Within three months of its release, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned the ad, deeming it “likely to cause serious and widespread offense.”

The ASA’s ruling may not have come as a total surprise after the campaign stirred debate on social media. But Helen Rhodes, executive creative director of BBH London, countered: “We never set out to cause offense. This was for the community.”

“Interestingly, a lot of the negative comments were from men, who weren’t the focus of the campaign. The women who faced those issues found it incredibly empowering,” Rhodes told ADWEEK. “It seems that women’s issues in advertising are still a taboo. There are a lot of double standards here.” 

Rhodes’ comment echoes an observation made about another ad that was banned around the same time as GirlvsCancer’s campaign. This one was from Calvin Klein, featuring singer-songwriter FKA Twigs in a black and white image with a shirt draped around her nude body. The ASA ruled that it depicted her as a “stereotypical sexual object”—yet another Calvin Klein ad portraying a partly unclothed Jeremy Allen White was not banned. 

FKA Twigs argued that she actually found Calvin Klein’s image of her empowering. “In light of reviewing other campaigns past and current of this nature, I can’t help but feel there are some double standards here,” she wrote on Instagram. 

A similar debate flared up during this year’s Super Bowl. Cosmetics brand NYX and agency McCann New York were forced to make some last-minute changes to its ad starring Cardi B, after the NFL rejected the punchline. Critics of the NFL’s decision called it “censorship of the female perspective.”

While on the surface women’s experiences and issues are becoming better represented across media, marketers who cater to female audiences still report increased scrutiny and sometimes outright censorship of their advertising on certain platforms. This presents a creative challenge to brands in this space, forcing many to grapple with the appropriate level of provocation when confronting taboos.

U.K. retailer Lovehoney Group, which sells products including vibrators and lubricant that often target female consumers, knows this challenge firsthand. The company has faced ad bans on social media, a problem that “seems to actually be getting a bit worse,” according to Friederike Lewin, Lovehoney’s head of global communications. 

Lovehoney is not alone. Last year, The Center for Intimacy Justice (CIJ) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Meta, accusing the social media giant of systemically rejecting ads and information from women’s sexual health brands. 

In 2022, the CIJ studied 60 women’s health companies and found all of their ads were rejected on both Facebook and Instagram over the last three years, with almost half of those companies having their accounts suspended during the period. But in several instances, the ad policies only penalized content related to women and nonbinary people’s sexual health, while men’s sexual wellness brands were approved. 

For Lovehoney and similar brands, this is particularly concerning as many say they are trying to destigmatize and provide accurate information about sexual health and wellness. Lovehoney partners with sex educators whose content frequently gets shadow banned on social media, Lewin said. 

 “We see [censorship] specifically when it’s focused on female bodies. There’s an unfair component to it,” she added. 

Bold marketing tactics

Lovehoney has faced this issue head on with marketing that “has a twinkle in its eye,” said Lewin. For example, one of its campaigns used playful images such as a bouquet of flowers or an ice cream cone–representing a vulva and periods–to correct myths about intimate topics. 

“We need to be as subtle as possible but also in your face. This balance is the challenge but also the fun in it,” Lewin said. 

Fem-tech company Elvie, which makes a wearable breast pump and a pelvic floor trainer, must also think outside the box to skirt ad bans. Censorship of its content on social media has been “one of our biggest obstacles as a brand,” said Fiona Dunleavy, Elvie’s global brand director.

In 2022, Elvie set up a “breastfeeding bench” in places across Europe, including near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, where breastfeeding in public is still seen as taboo. That same year, it erected a 20-foot billboard in London that leaked water to raise awareness of incontinence. A real woman who deals with incontinence–and whose posts on TikTok about the topic had been removed by the platform–appeared in the ad. 

Such campaigns generated press coverage and social media engagement, said Dunleavy, explaining that the brand often relies on offline stunts “where we don’t have to compromise on creative execution.” 

Nevertheless, Dunleavy expressed frustration at the additional obstacles that female-focused brands like hers must confront to convey their messages. Elvie’s team goes through a “laborious process” with platforms like Meta and TikTok to approve the content of their ads. Some have still been deemed explicit or banned, yet she contrasted that with men’s sexual health brands like Hims, which has been able to run paid ads on Facebook for its erectile dysfunction pill. 

“There does appear to be a gendered double standard,” Dunleavy said. “We need to shift consumer behavior, because women’s health has been ignored for so long, but there’s still a long way to go in destigmatizing this space.”

A balancing act

While many female-focused brands resort to daring marketing tactics, they must also walk a tightrope between getting noticed and alienating audiences.

Essity brand Bodyform has a long history of navigating this challenge through advertising its menstrual products. In 2017, with its “Blood Normal” campaign by agency AMV BBDO, it became the first U.K. advertiser to depict real menstrual blood. 

Bodyform and its agency have jumped through many hurdles to get its campaigns out on mainstream media channels. There was a time when advertising for period products wasn’t allowed on TV in certain countries during mealtimes, said Margaux Revol, strategy partner at AMV BBDO. 

 “Clearly we have won so many battles. It’s not automatic that you will get banned even if there are complaints [from viewers],” Revol said, pointing to Bodyform’s 2022 “#Periodsomnia” campaign, which received hundreds of complaints but was not banned by the ASA. 

Bodyform has won numerous advertising awards and inspired other marketers to venture into previously taboo territory. But despite being praised for its boldness in addressing women’s issues from period pain to miscarriage, Revol said the brand is not just out to get attention and smash taboos for the sake of it. Rather, it carefully considers how to speak about topics that may make audiences uncomfortable. 

“It’s important to have empathy about why something might shock someone or not. It might be an intimate, sensitive or traumatic topic,” Revol said. “There are many ways of bringing difficult topics to people’s consciousness that don’t necessarily involve saying it’s a taboo and breaking it boldly. Sometimes, by using those shortcuts, you shut down conversations about the nuances of a situation.”

Each time Bodyform and AMV BBDO have ventured into new territory, they have first conducted extensive research among women and girls to understand the real experiences and biases affecting them. 

BBH said it did the same when making the GirlvsCancer ads. The creative challenge was daunting–and it ultimately ended with a banned billboard–but the campaign’s message continues to resonate with a community of women grappling with life changes brought about by cancer, said Rhodes. 

“If there’s a section of the community who felt invisible and now feel seen and empowered, that makes it all worth it,” Rhodes said.