Brides are targeted by advertisements for weight loss products – 01/28/2024 – Equilíbrio

After getting engaged in March 2022, Lauren Aitchison, 34, noticed a significant increase in ads focused on wedding content, running marketing phrases like “get ripped in time for the wedding” and “marathon bridal workout.” “It wasn’t a big surprise to my algorithm because my Pinterest boards were already pretty full,” she jokingly comments.

Until then, she had been inundated with diet and bridal jewelry ads, but something changed when she posted about her engagement. “Before, I got some stuff about weight loss. But then, in addition to ‘intermittent fasting,’ for example, ‘intermittent fasting for your big day’ started appearing. The ads started to specifically mention marriage,” says Aitchison, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Social networks such as Instagram and TikTok, as well as the Google search engine, are advertising platforms for wedding suppliers, such as florists, bakeries and wedding planners. Many young women, for example, create boards of wedding-related images on Pinterest years before getting engaged. Many social platforms are effectively functioning as search engines, and wedding vendors are forced to feed their algorithms with new ideas.

As a result, there is a lot more content aimed at brides, and they end up inadvertently allowing technology companies access to private details about themselves and their personal lives. Katie Paul, director of the Technology Transparency Project, a nonprofit group that monitors the influence of technology on people’s lives, notes that this has contributed to the rise in wedding-related ads, especially those coming from diet and wellness companies. , like Noom.

For Aitchison, who just three hours after her engagement was scouting a possible venue for her wedding, the sudden increase in the influx of weight-loss ads targeting brides-to-be was unsettling, dampening the joy associated with the celebration.

But according to Paul, this dynamic is common in ad algorithms. “Data obtained from Facebook Papers, for example, indicates that the algorithm is highly sensitive. It was designed to measure the content that generates the most engagement, prioritizing the most impactful.”

The Facebook Papers, a set of company documents leaked in 2021 by a former employee, proved that the social network was aware that its Instagram application had a negative effect on teenagers’ body image. The algorithms that target targeted ads aim to show the content capable of eliciting the strongest feelings, even if they are negative, explains Paul.

After Facebook announced that it would remove content that promoted eating disorders and extreme weight loss, the Technology Transparency Project published a report in late 2021 that found that Instagram was still sharing content about weight loss. According to the organization, many of the recommended accounts explicitly promoted anorexia and bulimia, setting weight goals that reached a dangerous 35 kg.

Alysia Cole, 34, is a wedding stylist in Chicago who often works with plus-size brides. She says she has seen the impact of these ads on her clients, many of whom are in the process of recovering from eating disorders and unhealthy relationships with weight loss culture. According to her, the ads feed the weight-related insecurities of many future brides, something that arises even before the engagement. “What you see on Instagram is this implicit idea that beauty is directly related to thinness.”

Some of the ads focusing on weight-loss products and services have become more subtle, says Cole. We no longer talk about weight loss, but about “maintaining well-being” or “taking care of your health”. Marketing that associates weight loss with health, especially at a time when people were more attentive to personal well-being amid the Covid pandemic, has created a sense of personal responsibility that is harder to ignore than if it were simply a matter of aesthetics.

When gyms closed due to Covid social isolation, Jazmine Fries, 25, who is a ceremonialist in San Antonio and worked in the health sector at the time, spent a few years unable to prioritize physical exercise. In the fall of 2021, when she got engaged, she started seeing recommendations from wedding groups on Facebook specifically focused on weight loss, covering topics like detoxing through juices and tips for losing weight quickly.

Many brides are aware that ads are based on their online activity, whether it’s searching for bridesmaid dresses or posting photos of their engagement ring.

Katie Paul, 37, who got married in September, is cautious about using social media because of her work in technological transparency. Still, she came across ads promoting weight loss diets after announcing her engagement on Instagram. “At that moment, I hadn’t even thought about planning, I hadn’t researched anything. It’s an example of how these platforms send this content based on increasingly targeted advertising. We are being tracked across the internet.”

While Paul has seen some fitness ads specifically aimed at grooms, most of them are primarily aimed at brides.