• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer @mahoney_sarah, January 22, 2024

Aunt Linda is back in new Wisp ads.

Wisp thinks women could have a lot more laughs when looking for online sexual healthcare -- and shake off some negative ideas at the same time. Jenny Dwork, vice president of marketing, tells D2C Insider why women need comedy right now.

D2C Insider: Your target audience is sexually active young women. Many feel under siege since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Plenty of your customers live in states where they can’t access abortion care, and women all over the country are worried about losing access to birth control. So why humor now?

Jenny Dwork: We always try to lead with education and humor. Those things cut through, and we've seen it work well for us. We base everything we say on facts, and there are so many scare tactics and misinformation. So the first campaign, with Hila the Earth, is almost like "Schoolhouse Rock" for the Instagram age. Hila raps in her vulva costume. She’s best known for her focus on sustainability, and we have found a lot of overlap with our audience there. We worked with her six months ago on a herpes collaboration, which performed well for us. It had a 13% engagement rate. She just immediately grabs attention with these super witty raps.

D2C Insider: Indeed, she’s living La Vida Vulva. I was impressed with her rhyming the literal hood with the clitoral hood.

Dwork: Yes, you’re like, “This is just so ridiculous.” We wanted to reintroduce people to basics with Vagina Academy. It’s women getting to know their bodies in an engaging way. This is a brand campaign for us. We’re not hard-selling anything.

D2C Insider: The second campaign, which breaks soon, also revisits some characters you’ve used before -- comedian Steph Barkley as the “dad” in the fake mustache. This one is all about Aunt Linda, reminiscing about the not-so-good old days.

Dwork: When it comes to destigmatizing these issues -- yeast infections, UTIs, STDs –--we decided the last person you’d want to discuss them with is your dad. So Steph created this amazing Midwestern Dad for us. Those ads did so well for us on connected TV that we wanted to develop more.

So we added Aunt Linda to that family. She knows there's nothing to be ashamed of and that you can get your meds discreetly online. And again, it’s about education. In this campaign, we let her talk about the bad old days – bathing in apple cider vinegar or chugging cranberry juice and crying by the toilet. The message is that it’s OK to seek solutions.

D2C Insider: What’s the mood of your audience in this post-Roe climate?

Dwork: They’ve responded very positively to medication abortion in states where we can offer it. We stand out by being unapologetic and going back to education. We bring in our medical providers a lot, whether we’re talking about herpes, abortion or sexual pleasure. That approach is working. We had 30% year-over-year growth last year, and now have over 950,000 patients.

D2C Insider: These are brand efforts, not intended to drive sales of any particular medication. How do you balance that against performance marketing, which is typically important for digital brands?

Dwork: It is always a challenge. We have to figure out how to let the data tell the story and what metrics we deliver. We have solid ROI on all our campaigns. We have to be careful -- there are words we can’t say on CTV. But we’ve found as we increased the production value of videos, that’s improved. In the last six months, we've spent about half a million dollars on CTV, and they have performed well for us. And while the Hila the Earth ad would not get approval to run on CTV, social media builds brand awareness, too. And her work has grown our social media following.

D2C Insider: There have been reports of women stockpiling abortion medication and even birth control, fearing that laws will continue to threaten access. Have you seen that?

Dwork: We don't allow advanced provisioning for medical abortion. But we have seen a very large spike in birth control and emergency contraception. Whenever there's a headline that comes out about reduced access, we see a large spike in demand for emergency contraception.

People are planning ahead. And there are wins, too. Last summer, Opill, the first over-the-counter birth control pill, got approved. We are chomping at the bit to be one of the first to carry that once it comes out.

D2C Insider: After abortion, which of Wisp’s treatment areas do you think is the most stigmatized?

Dwork: Herpes. It’s the big boogeyman. The level of shame and stigma out there is such a mismatch with the physical reality. Yes, there’s no cure. But you can get suppressive meds that are super-effective. Whenever I see someone making a herpes joke, I think, 'We need to stop this.’ We did something a few years back aiming to destigmatize cold sores, a form of herpes, and we still get thanked for it. We're launching hydrocolloid bandages for cold sores.