• by Les Luchter , January 3, 2025

Contrave, the weight loss pill that combats food cravings, has launched its first-ever TV commercial -- with audio that features new lyrics to  Lesley Gore’s 62-year-old feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me.”

The song’s verse “You don't own me, Don't try to change me in any way” becomes “You don’t own me, don’t try to tempt me in any way” in the :90 spot, which debuts three months after the launch of “Quiet the Food Noise,” the brand’s all-digital awareness campaign focused on food cravings.

Besides the song, the new commercial created by the minds+assembly agency shows food like potato chips, muffins and cookies tempting several people, both female and male, and emphasizes how Contrave “is designed to work in two ways, to help reduce hunger and control cravings, so you can lose weight and keep it off.”

Contrave, in taking on buzzy and popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, claims the spot “offers a twist on the traditional pharmaceutical tv approach.”

“In market research, we spoke with real-life patients and the resounding feedback was, ‘This isn’t like most pharma ads. This speaks to me, because this is what it’s really like to live with these challenges,’” Derrick Gastineau, head of marketing for Contrave parent Currax Pharamaceuticals, said in announcing the campaign.

“In order to address the obesity epidemic, it is critical that patients and healthcare practitioners have access to information about all FDA-approved treatment options,” Gastineau adds in an email to Marketing Daily. “Contrave provides unique utility as a potentially most suitable option for many patients, as well as a potential alternative to the other approved classes of medications for treatment of obesity."

The Contrave spot, which launched the day after Christmas and will run through March, is running across “nearly all dayparts” on network TV, cable TV and streaming/connected TV platforms in 10 markets with high obesity rates, including Dayton, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; Jackson, Mississippi; New Orleans, Nashville, Buffalo, Grand Rapids and Omaha. Media agency is Klick Health.

Expansion into other markets will depend on what the brand sees through ongoing monitoring of performance data, Currax tells Marketing Daily.

The commercial is being backed with online search, social media and customer relationship management (CRM) efforts for consumers, as well as support for healthcare practitioners through CRM, sales reps and digital marketing.

Contrave, which combines the antidepressant bupropion with anti-addiction naltrexone, has been on the market for 11 years.  Its most-recent consumer campaign before the new one, titled “One Size Does Not Fit All,” ran on digital and social media, but not TV.

For “You Don’t Know Me,” this is far from the song's first use in advertising, but may be the first time its lyrics have been changed. Previous brands using the song have included Toyota in 2016, Orbitz with an LGBTQ+ twist in 2021, and Calvin Klein with a video starring Jeremy Allen White released a year ago this weekend. Gore herself “approved” the message for an anti-Republican campaign video in 2012, three years before dying of lung cancer at the age of 68.