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Is increased restriction the price our industry pays for governments and regulators passing the buck for decisions they’re too cowardly to take responsibility for?

There is, as they say, no new thing under the sun.

In December 1951, the then-Hollywood actor and future US President Ronald Reagan starred in the Christmas campaign for Chesterfield cigarettes. In it, he described how he planned to send packs of Chesterfield to all his friends, for the merriest Christmas any smoker can have.

Times were different then, of course. But even then, ads like this were not wholly uncontroversial with organisations like the Anti-Cigarette League of America.

Fast forward to 2026 and we find ourselves yet again debating another campaign that raises the question of whether a product that’s legal to make and sell, should also be legal to advertise. And whether celebrities and role models should be allowed to front the campaigns.

And if not, why not.

So step forward Serena Williams, whose controversial SuperBowl LX ad aired in February this year and launched her as the new face of online ‘telehealth’ company Ro. Which, essentially, sells drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy to paying customers for around $200–$300 a month. With airtime costs of $233,000 per second, and total investment on the spot estimated at some $29 million, Ro are clearly expecting to sell significant numbers of doses off the back of the former world-beating tennis pro.

And to judge by the backlash, a lot of people have problems with that.

The first thing to say, of course, is that unlike tobacco, which is estimated to physically kill 50% of its users, taking Ozempic is probably not going to shorten your life. This is despite a number of emerging concerns about some rare but significant side-effects. But for those suffering from the effects of obesity – the clogged arteries, the diabetes, the arthritis, the cancers – GLP-1 medications, as they’re known, could literally extend your life by years or even by decades. With more than 25% of UK adults now classified as obese – and a whopping 42% of US adults, those are significant benefits to society and to individuals.

And yet commentators in the media, and many users of X (formerly Twitter), have described Williams’s ad as ‘disgusting’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘shameful.’ And inevitably the furore has strengthened the growing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic for tighter advertising restrictions on the category.

The problem, it seems, is less to do with the product itself and how it could be used, in an ideal world, and more to do with how, and by whom, it actually is used in the world we live in.

A recent UK survey revealed that GLP-1s are less likely to be used by those most in need – morbidly obese people from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds – and more likely to be well-to-do women in their 30s and 40s who’d quite like to be a bit slimmer, and who don’t mind paying a couple of thousand a year for the privilege.

If you dig into the reasons behind the backlash to the Ro ad, they’re mostly rooted in moral objections to what is seen as medicalising and monetising a lifestyle preference for getting slim without putting in the effort of exercise and diet. And justifying it using a celebrity who, famously, devoted her entire career to strenuous exercise at the highest level. And who, presumably, also followed a rigorous sports-nutritionist-designed diet. But now she says drugs are the answer.

It’s a battle between distaste and disapproval, on the one hand, and freedom of choice and freedom of expression on the other.

Either way, it’s a fact that it’s legal to buy and sell GLP-1s.

It’s also a fact that Serena Williams lost 34lb using them.

And, if you have the money and the desire, you might question whether anyone has the right to put obstacles in your way.

Which brings us back to Ronald Reagan and his Chesterfields. And also to the recent controversies over advertising regulation on ‘HFSS’ (high fat, salt and sugar) food and drink.

Because what it looks like from where I’m sitting is an alliance of the world’s governments and regulators and the morally righteous, offloading difficult or unpopular decisions onto the advertising and marketing industries.

They want to stop people smoking, but they’re scared of the backlash if they ban it.

So instead they impose restrictions on the advertising industry.

Same thing for fast food.

Same thing for beer and spirits.

Which is why it’s encouraging to see regulators finally stepping out from behind our industry to take responsibility for their own decisions – and for any backlash.

Like the UK Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL), which imposes a tax on sugary drinks. Or the UK’s Australian-style Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which from 2027 will make it illegal for anyone born after January 1 2009 to buy tobacco.

Both of these moves could invite debate – the sugar tax because it could be seen as penalising the poor while having little effect on the spending habits of the well-to-do, and the phased tobacco ban because it raises the prospect, some years down the line, of 70-year-olds hanging around outside corner shops accosting 80-year-olds to get them to buy a pack of 20 for them. But at least the responsibility, and any negative reaction, comes back to the governments and regulators making the policies, rather than with the agencies.

But for as long as the world’s regulators seek to use advertising restrictions to get our industry to enforce their unpopular decisions for them, controversies like Serena Williams’s Ro ad are going to come back time and time again.

First published in WARC 23 March 2026.