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:
Q 1. Your ad with Johnny Sins nearly ‘broke the internet’ as they say. What have you been doing to recreate that kind of reach?
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.
Q 2. Seems like a departure from the way D2C brands, including you, have been approaching marketing.
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 since we keep doing creative campaigns like this again and again, people expect it. You can see in the comments [of our social media posts] people are discussing how this is just the way Bold Care does marketing.
A lot of this is championed by Rahul [Krishnan], my co-founder.
Q 3. But performance marketing is measurable. Isn’t it much harder to see returns on investment in brand awareness campaigns?
We have one of the best RoAS [return on ad spends] for any D2C brand out there. We have also been working to achieve profitability over the last year and a half.
So, our organic revenues are very high, and our retention and conversion rates are the best in the category. We have the second-highest market share [in sexual wellness], and we have taken some of Durex's market share as well.
These campaigns don’t give me revenue optics right on the day. But in the last 30+ quarters, we have seen steady growth, and we are spending significantly less on marketing than we did five quarters ago.
Online sexual health is not like BPC [beauty and personal care]. We have done a lot of work in category creation, so it is no longer about the numbers, but about getting the audience to engage.
Q 4. How do you balance using your celebrity investor, Ranveer Singh, in ads with the other celebrities you’re engaging with?
Ranveer and his team worked closely with us on branding and marketing on our first campaign. But we have to create a pyramid where we are not just leaning on Ranveer Singh only. We lean on our good work with Anurag Kashyap and Samay Raina.
In fact, we discuss our marketing campaign ideas with Ranveer and with Samay as well. They have both been really good for our brand. Ranveer is a high-energy person, and we try to do humour-first marketing, which Samay’s image is well tuned to. But there’s no conscious choice as such on doing one thing with Ranveer and another with Samay and so on.
Q 5. Some of the faces you’ve worked with have courted controversy in the past, including Anurag Kashyap or Samay Raina with his India’s Got Latent. Does that become a brand concern? Or is it rather a reason to partner with them instead?
This is a complicated question. It would really depend on the nature of the controversy as well. If it is about something a company has a strong stance on, we would need a certain kind of thinking. But we don’t need to shy away just because there's controversy.
The first thing Samay did after taking a break [from his comedy] was a campaign with us. Times are changing, and you have to be honest with who you are. If a genuine mistake was made, then it’s not my job to do moral policing. The audience will not engage with content they don’t want to see. We are a ₹100+ crore business today [by ARR]. If my products were bad, none of my campaigns would work. I don’t bombard people with ads.