The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2025
Ladywell scrambles banned health words so women's ads pass filters — #UncensorYourHealth
A women's health brand builds a Scrambler that misspells banned words just enough to pass platform filters while staying readable.
Ladywell
What it had to solve
Ladywell, a San Francisco supplement brand for hormone health and fertility, found every ad variation it submitted was rejected: Facebook and Instagram flagged ordinary terms like "fertility," "hormones," "IVF" and "vagina" as explicit, and one of its products was delisted on an e-commerce platform for a full year. Research it cited showed 84% of women's health ads get removed and 90% of women's health organizations face restrictions.
How it works
Ladywell, a San Francisco wellness brand selling supplements for fertility and hormone health, kept hitting a wall that had nothing to do with its products: platform moderation. Founder Ashley Rocha told MediaPost that words like "fertility," "hormones" and "IVF" caused its ads to be rejected no matter how images and layouts changed, and that one product was removed from an e-commerce platform for an entire year — a "devastating loss of revenue" and a barrier to medically accurate information.
Instead of quietly switching to coded "algospeak," Ladywell made the censorship itself the campaign. With Saatchi & Saatchi and production company Tool, it built the Censorship Scrambler, an AI tool that scrambles health-related terms just enough to bypass automated filters while remaining readable to humans — a trick that works because people read by word shape, a phenomenon known as typoglycemia.
Why it lands
- Ladywell turned its own rejected ads into proof of the problem instead of hiding them.
- Typoglycemia is a genuine cognitive quirk, so the fix worked without misleading readers.
- Making the Scrambler public converted a brand fix into an advocacy platform anyone could use.
- The campaign let Ladywell name its year of lost revenue publicly, making an abstract moderation issue concrete.
What it did
Saatchi reports 70M+ earned impressions, a 400% increase in ad approval and a 230% increase in traffic; founder Ashley Rocha said the first week's ads passed unflagged after a year of rejections. The campaign won the 2026 Webby for Best Social Impact Campaign.
What you can take
When a platform's automated rules block your category, don't fight the review queue — build a tool that exploits the gap between machine filters and human reading, and give it away so the fix scales.
Since then
The paid social flight ran for a month from September 24, 2025, while the Scrambler website and organic social continued indefinitely, with Ladywell explicitly inviting other brands to use the tool and join the conversation about women's health censorship. The campaign earned the 2026 Webby for Best Social Impact Campaign and was widely covered in trade press as an example of fighting platform rules with product thinking rather than appeals.
Sources
- Ladywell fights back against health censorship with new campaign
- Ladywell's Scrambler Uncensors Women's Health Messaging Online
- #UncensorYourHealth — Our Work
- The advertising, media, and PR award winners from the 30th annual Webby Awards
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