Last year, Hims & Hers put out a Super Bowl ad—the first for the telehealth giant—that sparked both support and outrage for the way it claimed that Big Pharma prices GLP-1s “for profits, not patients” and offered up its own cheaper compounded versions of the weight-loss meds.
A year later, Hims & Hers is returning to advertising’s biggest stage with another spot drawing attention to the issue of healthcare affordability. Its Super Bowl LX commercial scales up the target, taking aim this time not at the pharma industry but at the privatized U.S. healthcare system as a whole.
The minute-long ad, which debuted online Thursday ahead of its broadcast premiere during the Feb. 8 game, starts with a stark claim: “Rich people live longer,” said by the ad’s narrator, the rapper and actor Common.
The commercial rapidly flips through scenes of apparently wealthy people undergoing intense cosmetic procedures and using high-tech health devices—as a headline flashes by describing how someone has spent millions to “cheat death.” There’s also a parody news clip about the “world’s richest man in orbit again,” starring an actor who bears more than a passing resemblance to one Jeff Bezos.
“All that money doesn’t just buy more stuff—it buys more time,” Common continues in voiceover. “The wealth gap is a health gap. The rich have healthcare that comes to them: custom-formulated peptides, specialists on call and preventative care before they need it.”
With Hims & Hers, however, everyone else can now “get the best of everything,” too, he claims.
The ad’s imagery shifts to show regular people undergoing blood testing, exercising, reaching for Hims & Hers branded medications and using the company’s mobile apps to review results and chat with doctors.
According to the narration, the company offers “diagnostic testing for a complete snapshot of your health, weight loss treatments that can be microdosed to fit your goals, menopause and testosterone hormones to keep you feeling great and early cancer detection through a simple blood test.”
“The same science, the same access, no connections required,” Common concludes. “Now that’s rich.”
In an accompanying announcement Thursday, Hims & Hers cited statistics showing that in the U.S., “people living in the top 1% live 7 years longer, on average, than those living in the bottom 50%, based on median household income.”
The ad is therefore meant to challenge “a system that has been broken for generations,” Dan Kenger, the company’s chief design officer, said in a statement, and to spark change by raising awareness of how Hims & Hers is “democratizing access to the kind of proactive, personalized care that all people deserve,” per CEO Andrew Dudum.
“We’re not showing off products; we’re helping people visualize a future where premium care is accessible for every single person on the planet,” Kenger said in the release.
Meanwhile, in a blog post about the ad, the company suggested that it’s prepared to potentially stir up just as much controversy as it did with last year’s Super Bowl spot.
“At Hims & Hers, we don’t shy away from uncomfortable truths, and we fully expect this ad will ruffle some feathers. When you challenge a status quo that has existed for generations, the establishment talks back,” it wrote. “But it’s a small price to pay to expose a glaring, unfair reality: getting and staying as healthy as possible remains an exclusive privilege for those who can afford it.”
The blog post continued, “If our message makes the industry uncomfortable, it’s because their profits rely on the many but benefit the few.”
“Traditional healthcare profits are often unrelated to whether a patient actually gets better, and at worst, those profits are tied to customers staying sick,” Hims & Hers wrote later on in the post, touting its own model instead—which, it said, succeeds “only when our customers do.”