Bullish on Ozempic

Mar 20, 2023

∙ Paid

Ozempic has started to advertise on New York subways. Not great! This week, the viral injectable weight-loss and diabetes medication made its way to New York City subways via an ad campaign from telehealth company Ro, which recently started offering Ozempic to its patients online. If it seems like Ozempic is everywhere (including the cover of last week’s New York Magazine), it’s because it is. Weight Watchers recently acquired telehealth platform Sequence, which connects patients with doctors who can prescribe the drugs. WW is also cutting more than 300 in-person meeting locations, or about 29% of its footprint, many of them in urban areas like Chicago and Washington, D.C. that were leased on a month-to-month basis. In 2018, the company made a splash by reducing its emphasis on weight loss and focusing more on healthy living, but take one look around women’s media today and you’ll know that the pendulum has swung back to weight loss as king. The spending doesn’t stop at the drug. Now surgeons are being tasked with treating the phenomenon of “Ozempic face” with expensive fat transfers and face lifts, opening a whole new world of solutions to problems people have been making for themselves.

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