How Unbound Babes Fooled Meta's Sponsored Content Moderators

LOS ANGELES—A few months back, a new performance brand for men called Thunderthrust saw success on social media. Advertising a slate of recovery and therapeutic products for active men, the team behind the brand managed to bring in sales. The campaign was a win. But there was a catch. Thunderthrust wasn’t real. It was a marketing stunt put on by a sexual wellness and pleasure product company, Unbound Babes. Co-founded by entrepreneurs Polly Rodriguez and Sarah Jayne Kinney, Unbound Babes sells itself as a “renegade” pleasure brand with no issue holding power accountable. Unbound is probably best known for its “Vibes for Congress” campaign in support of Planned Parenthood and reproductive health rights. The company doesn’t fear a catchy yet controversial marketing and public awareness campaign. Thunderthrust is a cheeky nod to the brand's core ambition of challenging the historically male-dominated adult space. “There’s so much sexuality in advertising in general,” Rodriguez, also Unound’s chief executive officer, said in an interview with Beauty Independent. “Is it really the products that are offensive, or is it just the notion of women, femme, nonbinary people, anybody but a cis man owning their own body and using pleasure on their own terms? “It’s not the products because, when they’re framed in a different light, especially one that society more often than not deems appropriate, which is through the lens of toxic masculinity, they’re not offensive,” Rodriguez explained. Considering this, a consistent challenge in the work of advertising sexual wellness and pleasure products on mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is advertising content moderation and human bias. While these platforms retain the right to self-regulate as they see fit, there is still concern among product sellers and advertisers that there is an overt bias among the human moderators handling trust and safety issues. Unbound Babes noticed this bias and wanted to test it when it came to advertising products on the platforms owned by Meta Platforms Inc.—the Mark Zuckerberg-owned social media and technology empire. Unbound is an online, direct-to-consumer brand that sells well-designed sexual wellness and pleasure products designed in-house by a passionate product development team. Its products are easily accessible to virtually all consumer groups, but the brand emphasizes marketing to audiences that include women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. One of the most popular toys sold by Unbound Babes is what's billed as the “people's buttplug," highlighting its accessibility to a broad range of adult consumers. A recent addition to the product line is the adorable "Squish"—an innovative haptic tech toy that one product reviewer for Vice News referred to as “charming” and “intuitive.” The company also produces lubes and various products designed by women for women. It also sells smart sex toys. Simplistic marketing is the strategy at Unbound. A typical advertising campaign for a platform such as Facebook would feature a product image of one of the company's popular personal vibrators with colorful backgrounds and other elements in the art. Unbound's product and digital marketing teams quickly saw advertising denials after moderators saw the company’s relatively “vanilla” advertisements as inappropriate or found that they violated terms and conditions governing the circulation of sexually explicit sponsored content and posts across Facebook and Instagram. This led the company to take a stand against the big tech giant in a stroke (no pun intended) of digital marketing genius. The plan started by generating a hypothesis to test whether Meta’s moderation processes collectively treated sexual wellness brands like Unbound the same way in content moderation. Initial research and the experience of direct-to-consumer advertising on Meta platforms revealed a bias against more feminine and queer sexual wellness products in favor of “performance” brands that explicitly cater to cis-gender heterosexual men.  “We just saw, a bunch of times, over and over again, Meta would approve ads for brands that primarily serve men,” Sam Leander told AVN in a phone interview. Leander is Unbound’s senior manager for wholesale. Leander continued: “We saw ad copy like ‘get hard or get your money back,’ or ‘he chews it, we do it.’ There are a lot of brands that read AVN.com that face the censorship we do, but some of these brands are able to get these ads run [on Meta’s platforms]."  “At the same time as we were seeing ads with, like, cock rings, phallic imagery and suggestive language, all of the ads we would try and run—even if it is for a tote bag—were getting rejected. … [We] have had a lot of success due to virality and word-of-mouth, but being blanket banned from sponsored content has put us at a huge disadvantage, especially being an e-commerce company,” Leander said. Considering several elements, Thunderthrust came to fruition. Leander explained that Thunderthrust was already an inside joke among the team at Unbound. The team of eight saw Thunderthrust as the best name for a brand that reached over 100,000 people on social media and generated actual sales. Some of the products advertised in the faux Thunderthrust campaign included a flat-black iteration of Unbound's "Squish" toy, but renamed the "Smash Tension Grip" and described as “compact, ergonomic, and built to withstand the rigors of intense use.” Unbound Babes’ signature wand massager, "Ollie," was turned flat-black, too, and rebranded as a “percussive massage tool.” Unbound sells "Cuffies," body-safe silicone cuffs. But the "Cuffies" were presented under Thunderthrust as "Buff Cuffs" resistance bands—also in flat black.  The advertisements under the Thunderthrust branding were designed to appeal to consumers who would respond to imagery evoking toxic masculine tendencies (e.g., men entrenched in fitness brand cults on the internet). All of the Thunderthrust ads were approved by content moderators, while those using the Unbound branding were again denied for being sexually explicit, inappropriate and violating the terms and conditions of Meta’s sites. The Thunderthrust website is still live.  For the genuine original products from Unbound Babes, visit unboundbabes.com.