One Super Bowl Ad Is Attracting Bipartisan Pushback

For some viewers at home, the Super Bowl is a chance to see which team will emerge victorious and be declared NFL champions. For others, it’s a way to a see a lot of high-profile, big-budget ads — including some featuring prominent celebrities. But a very different Super Bowl ad set to air on Sunday has attracted serious scrutiny from a bipartisan pair of Senators.

This week, Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin and Kansas Republican Roger Marshall issued a letter expressing their concerns over an advertisment for telehealth company Hims & Hers. At issue, the senators argue, is that the commercial doesn’t feature the kind of mandatory disclosure that pharmaceutical ads are required to have.

“[N]owhere in this promotion is there any side effect disclosure, risk, or safety information as would be typically required in a pharmaceutical advertisement,” the senators wrote in their letter. Senators Durbin and Marshall also objected to the brief length of a disclaimer in the ad that indicates “that these products are not FDA-approved.” The letter is directed to the Food and Drug Administration, and noted that the agency took action multiple times in 2024 to ask other companies to update ads that didn’t abide by federal guidelines.

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As Dani Blum reports at The New York Times, Hims & Hers responded with a statement indicating that they were “happy to continue working with Congress and the new administration to fix the broken health system” and that their commercial did not violate any laws. Blum also pointed out that the bipartisan pair of senators are far from the only people to offer a critique of the ad — sparking more debate that’s likely to magnify after it airs on Sunday.