THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project

Frida Uncensored

Entered in Consumer Brands

Objective

For generations, women navigating fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and parenting relied on instinct, word of mouth, and trial and error. Frida Uncensored is a revolutionary educational platform that breaks through the long-standing barriers of censorship around conception, pregnancy, postpartum, and breastfeeding. It bridges the gap between censorship and education, confronting the alarming voids in access to accurate health information online that leave women uninformed and underprepared during the most critical life stages, like pregnancy and postpartum.

Frida Uncensored launched with a goal of addressing the pressing need for accurate and instructive education and resources, and is a direct response to the censorship Frida faces on social media platforms and in advertising. Frida’s content is often rejected or obscured, thanks to a hostile advertising attitude towards women’s health brands.

Frida Uncensored is one of the first platforms that circumvent conventional social and digital media restrictions that shadowban or remove posts of women’s bodies. With its unfiltered and candid guidance, Frida Uncensored provides valuable support for women's health—normalizing acts like at-home insemination, prenatal perineal massage, and postpartum breast massages. Frida’s goal is for first-time moms to feel equipped and prepared emotionally as fourth-time moms by harnessing the power of education and community.

Strategy

Frida set out to create a campaign that transported women and birthers to an intimate setting where they felt comfortable learning and exploring their changing bodies. The goal was to develop anatomical tutorials that detail how to use Frida products and provide support for those in the postpartum and parenting journey. 

Frida Uncensored enlists real mothers who have gone through these physical experiences themselves to educate women and birthers firsthand. These unscripted videos are shot via iPhone on an all-female set, an intentional decision to create authentic content, showcasing the realities of what goes on in bedrooms and bathrooms across the country. 

The age-gated platform debuted with six detailed, uncensored how-to demo videos for products like the At-Home Insemination Kit, the Perineal Massage Wand, and the brand’s most recent innovation in its Fertility category: the first-of-its-kind, FDA-cleared Conception Aid Cup. Uncensored also gives Frida the opportunity to properly illustrate how to use its products—a hurdle the brand faces with online retailers, where products like the at-home insemination kit are often flagged as inappropriate. The platform also offers visual guides on practices like perineal massage, cleansing a postpartum vagina, and soothing cracked nipples—all topics that are critical to pregnant and postpartum women and birthers, yet rarely discussed in public forums.

With the launch of Uncensored, Frida reimagines education around women’s issues at a mass level, democratizing necessary information for critical life stages like pregnancy and postpartum. For decades, women’s health brands have faced a hostile advertising and content landscape, with platforms flagging words like "vagina" and "fertility" as explicit content. In addition, ads and online content depicting female anatomy—no matter how educational—have been rejected or obscured due to outdated societal taboos. 

Frida has experienced years of censorship, from an ad rejected in 2020 that detailed postpartum recovery to a 2021 spot that was rejected due to a depiction of breastfeeding. Most recently, an advertisement from Frida Fertility was rejected for showing the proper usage of its At-home Insemination Kit. Similarly, people routinely report social content that portrays a woman's body during pregnancy or postpartum (including Frida’s and others) for “indecency” or “adult content.” Despite this censorship and a rising threat to women’s bodily autonomy, there is a growing consumer demand for relatable and unfiltered sexual health education like Frida Uncensored. 

Results

Within the first month of launch, Frida Uncensored garnered 33K views, and the brand saw over 5K new email subscribers from viewers excited about the realistic depiction of the postpartum journey. On social media platforms, Frida Uncensored reached over 541K impressions. Despite algorithmic deprioritization and censorship of Frida’s content in the past, the brand received 3 billion paid and organic impressions from notable body-positive influencers, and Frida’s own Instagram post was reshared publicly over 1,500 times. Frida also saw coverage run in leading news and trade publications like The New York Times, The New York Post, Business Insider, and Ad Age, resulting in 2.5 billion organic media impressions with praise that Uncensored is educating and advocating for women without shying away from the raw aspects of birth and postpartum. 

Frida Uncensored continues to tackle a consumer and cultural need for information about women’s bodies with content that is reliable, unfiltered, and effective. The need for Uncensored was not only practical but emotional. Women and birthers have flooded the comment section of Frida’s social platforms, sharing how much Uncensored means to them, especially during a time when others are policing women’s reproductive rights and bodies. The raw, heartfelt praise from across the internet includes women sharing their own conception, pregnancy, and postpartum experiences.

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Frida

Link