• by Les Luchter , August 4, 2025

 Image above from Evofem Bioscience’s Phexxi ad, which showed Annie Murphy basically living inside a vagina.

Gynecologists and urologists partnering to help break sexual health stigma for both sexes?

That idea, raised by Dayna Sracic, executive director of consumer marketing for Endo Pharmaceuticals, drew positive response at MediaPost’s recent Pharma & Health Brand Insider Summit.

“There's an opportunity as marketers to help support each other in a synergistic and symbiotic way within the healthcare ecosystem,” said Sracic, whose firm markets Xiaflex, whose dual indications include Peyronie’s disease (curved penis).

Jan Weinstein, EVP at Publicis Health Media, whose clients include Astellas Pharma’s Super Bowl-advertised drug for hot flashes, Veozah, agreed that key opinion leaders from both the women’s health and men’s health fields might be able to work together as a team.

Alex Davis, biosimilars director, brand marketing strategy for women’s health pharma firm Organon, noted, however, that clinicians are faced with a lack of time for such pursuits. “The opportunity we have as marketers is to ask them what we can do to help with the time conundrum,” she said, “because what they got into the field for is not what they're doing. They're doing prior authorizations.”

“You have a fantastic idea,” Davis told Sracic, but joked that “you should talk to Wisp [the women’s sexual telehealth provider] about it.”

Sracic raised her idea during the Q&A section of a panel titled “Breaking the Silence: Making Women’s Health Impossible to Ignore,”which featured Weinstein and Davis.  By that point, Tim Ragland, vice president of marketing and strategy for Wisp, had already run two sessions at the Summit, so Wisp was already well familiar to attendees.

During the Q&A portion of his first presentation, titled “Inside Wisp’s Evolving Model for Care,” Ragland noted that one of his brand’s own efforts to make women’s health impossible to ignore -- its taboo-shattering use of the word “vagina” on a Times Square billboard -- hadn’t necessarily led to regular use of out-of-home campaigns. While a recent digital OOH test was effective, he said, “it didn't quite give us the lift we needed to justify doing it again….On the flip side, we did a direct mail campaign that was quite effective and we continue to do that.”

Some 60% to 70% Wisp’s ad spend, Ragland added, goes to bottom funnel media like paid search and paid social. Wisp is also allotting 3% to 4% of its spend on connected TV, he said, with testing finding humorous commercials to be most attention-grabbing.

Organon’s Davis again brought up controversy over the use of the word “vagina.”

Davis was formerly at McCann Health New Jersey, where she worked on the Annie Murphy campaign for Evofem Bioscience’s Phexxi contraceptive gel, in which Murphy is shown as, in essence. living in a vagina.

The agency faced such questions from male colleagues like “Is America really ready to hear the word vagina on national television?” Davis recalled. “And we were like, ‘Women are!...So we ran the campaign and and women said, "Thank you finally."

That’s how you break down barriers,” she said. “You give people permission to defy what the norm is.”

Referring to Veozah’s Super Bowl menopause ads, Weinstein recalled a “big backlash saying, ‘I don't want to be hearing about this. Don't run this. Don't ruin my football game.’” Criticism was not only ageist to menopausal women, but sexist as well, she noted, with people saying, “Good you ran the commercial at the beginning of the game, because by halftime your audience would be asleep.”

Weinstein also gave a shout-out to a Super Bowl campaign she didn't work on: Novartis’ 2025 “Your Attention, Please” ad for breast cancer awareness. “It was very in-your-face and I'm sure some people didn't like it,” she said, but represented “a definite indication of embracing a cultural conversation on the biggest stage to talk about something that is really, really important in a smart, provocative and inspiring way.”

Davis, referring to the trope of pharma ads focusing on people jumping off of docks (“I’ve never seen so many people swim in lakes in my entire life”), said that instead of benchmarking against other pharma ads, one of her recent biosimilar launches looked at Airbnb, which "changed how we travel. We looked at Netflix which changed how we watch content. And we looked at Amazon, which changed how we shop. That’s how you break through.”

She added, “You have to trust your instincts. You have to trust the research. You have to trust the insights about the person you're really trying to motivate to change and to act.”