The crowded field has made attracting new customers expensive. In four weeks in February of this year, Blink was paying an average of almost $680,000 per week for various marketing costs including paid search and Facebook to bring in about $520,000 in weekly realized gross revenue, on average, according to numbers viewed by Bloomberg News.
An outside spokesman for Blink didn’t respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg.
According to iSpot, Hims has launched 18 nationally aired TV ad campaigns and Roman has aired 11, in addition to aggressive targeted campaigns on social media platforms like Instagram. Hims has hired Partners & Spade, a branding firm that also counts J. Crew and Warby Parker as customers. A campaign for Roman by the firm Circus Maximus won an AdAge digital award.
They’ve also turned to the same older customers that the brand-name pharmaceutical companies once sought. While one recent Hims commercial featured rapper Snoop Dogg, both have recently advertised on cable news channels including Fox News’s primetime opinion shows with hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Cable news audiences in general tend to skew older, and the Fox shows have a viewership consisting primarily of those over 50, according to the firm Nielsen, which tracks viewership.
While the companies have helped bring in new patients, their bigger challenge may be keeping them. Brandon Scarberry, 19, lives in North Carolina and commented on one of Hims’s Instagram posts: “5x20mg for $25 Ridiculous. Go to a doctor.”