Every Monday we share a quick “best of” from the week that was with our Inner Circle members. Curious what’s trending in the Femtech Insider community and beyond? We’ve got you covered! In this week's brief we talk about Dame's Settlement with the MRT, plus...
- Major Trends in Medicaid
- Event: Trends at the Intersection of Beauty and Women's Health
A Win for Femtech Advertising?
Last week brought an unquestionably important win on the advertising front for femtech and sextech companies. Sexual wellness company Dame finalized its settlement with The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority ("MTA”) to become the first female-founded pleasure product brand approved to advertise city-wide through the MTA. “Get In Touch With Yourself” marks Dame’s largest out-of-home brand awareness campaign to date.
Dame CEO Alexandra Fine commented: "Sexual pleasure is a critical part of wellbeing. Denying Dame advertising space stifles our ability to articulate the value we bring; to innovate and develop products for female sexual pleasure; and enforces sexual shame as a societal norm. The MTA was disproportionately applying their anti sexually-oriented business clause to women’s pleasure advertisements, which is unconstitutional. They allowed erectile dysfunction advertisements to run while denying us, making them a social and economic gate-keeper on who is entitled to pleasure. We’ve had to fight for our right to advertise and we believe this is a step forward in closing the pleasure gap."
Many believe that this development can be an important impulse for the ongoing fight for fair access to online advertising on Facebook, Google & Co. But is this really the case?
Jackie Rotman's Center for Intimacy Justice is leading a multi-pronged, strategic approach to propel rewriting tech's advertising policies to allow ads for female sexual health. So for today's brief we reached out to Jackie to get her thoughts on last week's news.
Is the Dame/MRT Settlement the Start of a Femtech Advertising Revolution? Here's what she had to say:
"I'm proud of Alex and the Dame Products team for their persistence. I'm proud of women who have fought for fair advertising policies on the New York City subways like Polly and the Unbound team, and the team at Thinx. But I am not proud of the MTA.
I was eagerly and excitedly awaiting last Monday as the first time in history that people with vulvas would be represented in vibrator ads on a subway in the US. Instead, I was met with disappointment in the MTA. The MTA still does not allow Dame to talk about Dame's products in today's ads. It does not allow Dame to show images of its products. The MTA ads are of abstract (beautiful) art. The MTA has not guaranteed Dame can run ads after Q1, 2022, and does not signal that others in Dame's category can also advertise. All this is after 3 years of legal work, and while Hims is still allowed to show subway ads that say "Up made easy" and "Rise to the occasion" for erectile dysfunction. Getting these Dame ads on the subway is a step -- an action in the fight for advertising practices based on equity and wellbeing -- but is far from equality or where we can be.
The New York City subways are symbolic. When one sits in the New York subways and sees one's self represented in an ad, it says, "You belong. You are seen. You're represented." Yet, the New York City subways are one piece of the puzzle. Systemic growth -- the type of advertising policies that allow health companies for women and people of diverse genders to grow to $5+ billion valuations, to generate economic opportunity and equity for women and people of diverse genders on par with that of men, to serve billions of people through health access, products and information, to increase investment and technological innovation in health -- currently is driven most significantly through advertising on technology platforms. Facebook is still a critical advertising platform for businesses, and Google and other tech platforms also drive growth for entrepreneurs. These tech platforms' ad practices -- which also systematically prohibit women's health advertisements across a number of categories today, at scale -- are critical.
Center for Intimacy Justice will soon be releasing the largest investigation to date on advertising practices toward women's health at Facebook and other tech platforms, and we look forward to driving change in collaboration with partners in the field."
So as you can tell: There's still a lot of work to be done. More on this soon...
Links:
👉 Center for Intimacy Justice
👉 Dame Settles with the MTA and Launches Its New “Get in Touch With Yourself” Campaign in New York Subways (Femtech Insider)
👉 Jackie Rotman: Vagina's Deserve Big Ads, Too (New York Times)
Major Trends in Medicaid
This months saw the release of McKinsey's brief "Preparing for 2022: Considerations for managed Medicaid programs" that outlined four major trends that capture the evolution of the managed Medicaid landscape.
Overall Medicaid enrollment grew by about 10 million between Q1'20 and Q1' 21, yet when we take a look at the healthtech ecosystem (and according to a recent STAT article), companies often "tend to follow the money. That means that for years, Medicaid — the public insurance program serving nearly one in five U.S. residents — has been largely left behind in the race to use tech to provide more convenient, better care.
That’s changing though, amid increased calls for equity and inclusion in health care and as a growing cadre of private and public payers begin to align themselves with value-based care models that reward clinicians for the quality of care they provide, rather than the quantity of services given. There’s a crop of pioneering startups beginning to court the roughly 76 million people covered by Medicaid.
Several startups in the space take on financial risk to care for their patients. Others serve as care navigation tools, helping to link patients to the services already provided by their health plan, such as regular check-ups and disease screenings. And others have created data platforms to help health plans and providers better target and serve their Medicaid patients."
So today we want to introduce a few of the companies in femtech and (more generally digital health) to you, who are active in this space and innovating for the Medicaid population.
Wildflower connects women and families to better care by breaking down silos among providers, payer and best-in-class partners.
Twentyeight Health is a women's health platform focused on increasing reproductive & sexual health care access to underserved communities.
Pandia Health's mission is to make women’s lives easier by bringing birth control to women wherever they have internet and a mailbox.
Pelvalon's Pelvic Health Therapy, Eclipse System, is covered by Medicate and Medicaid.
Oula’s platform gives women another option to hospital-birth through its obstetrics and midwifery care that treats birth as a natural life event with medical interventions only when necessary.
Cityblock Health uses technology to provide primary care to people covered by Medicaid and assumes the financial risk associated with providing that care.
ConsejoSano to help people from diverse backgrounds access the everyday medical services already provided by their Medicaid plans.
Nuna crunches data from CMS and other payers and providers to help them track and boost their outcomes in cost and quality.
