The cost of fame: why Bold Care found A-listers cheaper and more effective than the Meta ad algorithm

Mumbai: Sexual wellness brand Bold Care’s first brush with virality was in 2024, when it released a saas bahu style soap opera ad starring actor (and investor) Ranveer Singh, along with adult entertainment star Johnny Sins, for its condoms and other products. Since then, it has been investing in a series of campaigns featuring celebrities and influencers best known for speaking their mind and, sometimes, courting controversy.

In this, Bold Care’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Rajat Jadhav says he is looking for a way to reduce long-term dependence on expensive performance marketing and focus only on brand awareness.Edited excerpts:We have been doing a number of campaigns with [stand-up comedian] Samay [Raina] for the last year or so. There has been one with him and Raj Shamani, then one last year, with him and [director] Anurag Kashyap.We also did a simple one where we filled Samay’s car with condoms.

We just wanted to do a simple ad. That simple creative alone got us 55 million impressions and over 1.5 million likes.We have also been running an outdoor ad campaign.

We wanted to have some billboards go live and turn it into a game, getting users online to create the best content around finding these billboards.The way we do our marketing, especially these sorts of campaigns, is that we are no longer [focused on] performance marketing. We don’t want to do these cookie-cutter campaigns with a standard CTA [call to action] and a set format.

The amount of work we have done in the last year and a half allows us to focus on the brand awareness piece instead.Creatives like the one with Samay’s car also work because that is not the first thing we have done as a brand. People would have been confused otherwise.But