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The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has today warned the online pharmacy Juniper UK after it published a paid-for Facebook ad that encouraged new mothers to use weight-loss medication and exploited their insecurities about body image.

In its ruling on Juniper Technologies UK Ltd, trading as Juniper, the ASA also said the ad, which was seen on October 30 last year, breached its code by advertising prescription-only weight loss medicines to the public.

The ad was jointly published by Juniper and The Ryan Family (Theryanfamily_), run by Kelsey Daly, whose Instagram tagline reads “mum of three, fitness and everyday family life, welcome to the chaos”.

The ad carried the caption: “I probably needed a hug, but I decided to start a medicated weight loss journey with Juniper instead and I really didn’t expect it to bring so much more than progress on the scales. For me it’s about my confidence returning, the energy I thought I’d lost and a reminder that showing up for myself was always worth it.”

More text appeared stating “ad – my code KELSEY will give you discount x” and included hashtags #weightlossstory, #weightlossjourney, #weightlossprogress, #4stonedown and #juniper.

A video also showed clips of a woman looking after her baby, walking with a pram, posing for a picture and standing in a locker room holding a protein shake bottle.

Consumers who clicked on the ad were taken to a webpage with two options – ‘I’m new to weight loss medication’ and ‘I’m using weight loss medication’.

The ASA said consumers who clicked on the first option were taken to a page that featured an image of a Wegovy injection pen and below that, two product listings for Wegovy and Mounjaro injections with a thumbnail image of the devices.

The ASA said: “We considered that a consumer who had clicked on the ad and selected that they were ‘new to weight loss medication’ had not sought out further information about a condition and were actively presented with Wegovy and Mounjaro injections, both of which were POM options.

“We therefore considered that the landing page linked to from the ad, via a filtering page, referenced POMs.”

Must not be specific to POMs

The ASA got advice from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency whose guidance says website home pages should focus on medical conditions and services and not include any reference to named POMs.

The guidance also says “links and navigation aids” can be provided for conditions and diseases but must not be “specific to POMs”.

The MHRA told the ASA it was concerned “that the proactive provision of a direct link to a webpage or landing page that did not require any searching from the consumer to access that information could be analogous to that of a website homepage”.

Juniper insisted the web page with the two options operated like a homepage and said it understood that homepages should not expose “casual browsers” to specific POM references. They said the web page did not provide specific POM information or advertising.

“(Juniper) said they only shared more specific information about their offering once consumers chose to click through from that page,” the ASA said.

“They said consumers who did so were no longer casual browsers but had shown an interest in learning more about weight-loss medication, in the context of their own level of experience.”

According to the ASA, the Ryan Family said their role “was limited to sharing Kelsey’s personal experience of using Juniper’s service and signposting followers to Juniper UK’s platform”.

The Ryan Family said the ad did not contain named POMs and they did not create, control or design content on the landing page, including images of Wegovy or Mounjaro.

Juniper disagreed the ad encouraged new mothers to prioritise weight loss

The ASA also said Juniper disagreed the ad encouraged new mothers to prioritise weight loss and insisted the ad’s message “was not that weight loss should take precedence over motherhood but that mothers could seek a balance that felt right for them”.

Juniper claimed the line “I probably needed a hug but I decided to start a medicated weight loss journey with Juniper instead” showed a woman choosing “a form of self-care that suited her”, while the video “featured imagery of the woman with her baby and taking part in activities that were meaningful to her”.

The Ryan Family said the purpose of the content was not to encourage new mothers to prioritise weight loss after giving birth and instead reflected Daly’s “personal lived experience and her own health journey”.

However, Juniper accepted that new mothers were vulnerable to content relating to body image and withdrew the ad as a precaution.

Warning Juniper the ad must not appear again “in the form complained of”, the ASA said: “We told Juniper Technologies UK Ltd t/a Juniper to ensure their future advertising was prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and society and did not include gender stereotypes that were likely to cause harm or serious or widespread offence. We also told them not to promote POMs to the public in future.”