Telehealth provider Hims & Hers Health is set to make its Super Bowl debut this year with a gutsy 60-second commercial titled “Sick of the System” that puts the US healthcare system on blast while promoting affordable and effective weight-loss treatments.
The ad, featuring Childish Gambino’s 2018 song “This is America,” originally created in critique of systemic racism in the US, calls out the systemic issues in healthcare, with the weight loss industry as its clear target: “Welcome to weight loss in America, a $160 billion industry that feeds on our failure.”
It showcases a series of quickly changing visuals and headlines such as close-ups of junk food, imagery like animals fighting, magazines featuring cover about weight loss, people on scales and statistics about obesity, underscoring the challenges many face in accessing affordable care. “The system wasn’t built to help us, it was built to keep us sick and stuck,” the ad professes.
The commercial outlines how obesity is America’s deadliest epidemic, citing that 74% of the US population is overweight, and that obesity leads to half a million deaths each year.
While it doesn’t specifically point to which medications “work” for weight loss, it alludes to GLP-1 injections and their high cost.
The ad then switches gears from doom and gloom to hope that providers like Hims & Hers promise to bring through “life-changing weight loss medications,” which are “affordable, doctor-trusted and formulated in the USA.”
Hims & Hers has garnered attention for offering compounded semaglutide, a more affordable alternative to GLP-1 drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide formulations Mounjaro and Zepbound.
The list price of Wegovy is $1,349 per month without insurance or Novo’s savings plan. In contrast, Hims & Hers introduced compounded semaglutide injections last May starting at $199 per month.
Accompanying the TV ad is a website where Hims & Hers has a disclaimer about compounded drugs not being FDA approved or subject to assessments of safety and quality.
Compounding pharmacies started producing lower-cost versions of semaglutide and tirzepatide in the latter half of 2022 after both drugs were placed on the FDA’s shortage list within a few months of each other.
This prompted a lawsuit from Mounjaro maker Eli Lilly in 2023, which said it was taking legal action to “protect patients” as it could not “validate the safety or effectiveness of products claiming to contain tirzepatide that are not our own branded product.” Last year, the company reached a settlement with one of the medical spas it was suing.
The FDA also issued a warning last year about dosing errors that could lead to adverse events linked to the use of compounded semaglutide products.
However, when tirzepatide was removed from the list last fall, compounders sued the FDA, calling the move “reckless and arbitrary.” Their backlash prompted the agency to reassess its decision, though it ultimately reaffirmed it in December 2024.
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Although semaglutide is still on the FDA’s shortage list, Novo is making attempts to bar compounders from producing dupes of the drug. In October 2024, the company nominated semaglutide to be included on the FDA’s Demonstrable Difficulties for Compounding list. Scott Brunner, CEO of the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, criticized the move, calling it “more like desperation and an attempt by Novo to protect its revenue stream than a serious scientific argument.”
Removal of some of the GLP-1 drugs from the drug shortages list last year led to a drop in Hims & Hers’ stock.
By airing the ad during the biggest sports events of the year, Hims & Hers will be engaging a broad audience in hopes of raising discussions among consumers, the industry, regulators and legislators about the need for systemic change in healthcare, particularly the weight loss industry.
The company has experienced significant revenue growth, reporting a 77% increase in quarterly revenue in Q3 of 2024 compared to the same period the previous year, which it attributes in part to its weight-loss offerings.
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