America Is Experiencing a Confusing Avalanche of Small Boob Ads
In middle school, if someone came up to you and inquired about your membership in the Itty-Bitty Titty Committee, that was understood to be an act of hostility. So why has one bra company made that its whole advertising strategy?
Pepper is an online lingerie company that specializes in bras for small busts, and lately, it feels like no one—and I mean no one—can escape from its ads. They’re pretty innocuous—a typical one features a thin woman’s torso encased in an underwire bra, with the words “Bras redesigned for small boobs” superimposed over it, and they talk frequently about eliminating the “gap” between the bra and breasts that many standard bras leave wearers with. But the ads have become so omnipresent that people have started complaining about the brand’s bizarre, incessant small-boob blitz.
Jenny, a 25-year-old in California, told me that she recently saw so many Pepper ads on X (formerly known as Twitter) that she thought it was a bug. Then she wondered if she was being targeted—Jenny is trans, and it occurred to her that Pepper might be aiming their small-bra missiles at transfemme people who feel insecure about their chest size. “Are they trying to neg me or something?” she said, confused as to why she was being served nonstop reminders of her modest bosom.
Another X user who found Pepper’s ads to be off-putting wrote, “i keep getting ads that are targetted specifically for ‘good bras for small boobs’. this website is being so mean to me!!!”
“Can Twitter stop showing me the bras for small boobs ad. I get it they’re not that big but come on,” wrote another. Both are right: If you’re on the smaller side, it’s not always a pleasant thing to be singled out for.
The ads aren’t just haunting people with humble endowments, though. “Why’d I get an ad for ‘small boob bras’ on my TL? Lmao wrong bitch,” wrote another X user, one who probably would not fit into an AA, A, or B cup, which are the only sizes Pepper sells.
“I just thought it was kind of funny that I kept seeing it pop up everywhere when I have the opposite problem,” said Kristie Radwilowicz, a 32-year-old book designer based in New Jersey; “I’m an F-cup. I’ve been an F-cup for many, many, many, many, many years at this point. It just was kind of comical how much these bras were made for the opposite of someone of my particular kind of size and shape.” Radwilowicz told me she eventually changed her ad preferences to cut down on how much she was seeing the ads.
Still, Pepper’s ads are arguably more relevant to bosomy women than they are to another demographic currently being inundated with them: people who don’t have boobs at all. One day over the summer, noted cis man Chris Gilman started seeing Pepper ads on his Instagram and Twitter—sigh, X—feeds. It wasn’t just one, either. After scrolling down a few more posts, he would see the same exact ad again. Gilman, who typically gets ads for stuff like “bad shirts and thermoses,” was, like everyone else, deeply confused.
Gilman is a writer at the humor site ClickHole, so he took the experience and turned it into a pitch. It resonated with his co-workers, and in August, the site published a post he wrote with the headline “I Don’t Know Why Instagram’s Been Showing Me Ads for Bras Designed for Small Busts … but I’m Not Complaining! (by Cory Booker).” Why Cory Booker? No specific reason—Gilman just thought it would be “funny to imagine him scandalized.”
“The article came out in early August,” Gilman continued. “And I’m still seeing these ads. No matter who you are, you are getting these ads.” Even X owner Elon Musk is being confronted with bra ads (though not Pepper’s)—in March, he tweeted he was being served advertisements for plus-size bras.
What is going on here? Why is Pepper so insistent on extending Itty-Bitty Titty Committee invitations to people who don’t even meet the entry requirements?
Pepper didn’t respond to my multiple requests for comment, so we’ll never know for sure. But a number of marketing experts and laypeople—many of whom were just as perplexed by Pepper’s advertising as I was—were happy to attempt to fill in the blanks.
The general consensus is that Pepper’s marketing strategy might simply involve casting a really wide net. This would seem to be confirmed by something Colm MacCárthaigh, an engineer at Amazon Web Services, told me: After being served repeated Pepper ads on Facebook, he clicked on the site’s “Why am I seeing this ad?” option, and discovered that the specific population Pepper has in its crosshairs is … “users over the age of 18 in the United States.” Also, according to Facebook, he’d previously interacted with ads about “clothing, rucksacks, motorcycles, sporting goods, and bicycles,” which somehow qualified him to be besieged by very, very small bras.
Jack Johnston, an associate director specializing in paid social marketing at Tinuiti, a performance marketing agency, concurred. “I’m seeing a large volume of creative and not a lot of rhyme or reason to the targeting,” he said. “It’s a very interesting case.” According to Lisa Farman, a professor of strategic communication at Ithaca College who has studied targeted advertising, the only reason a company would indiscriminately target so many people would be if their campaign was just “pure awareness.” In that case, she explained, “You aren’t actually trying to convert the person to into a sale; you’re just kind of trying to get the word out there.”
“Sometimes these brands just want to have a voice,” Johnston continued. In some cases, they’ll even flood the market at the risk of receiving negative attention—all press is good press, right? And beware: Even if the ads don’t apply to you, ad platforms can track you lingering on them and retarget you based on that. To a bot, lingering out of morbid curiosity might be indistinguishable from lingering while contemplating a purchase.
To be fair, Pepper doesn’t have the easiest task when it comes to marketing because, as Farman pointed out, bust size isn’t typically something you put in your social media profile. That means it could be tricky to target the ads to the right audience if they don’t have the right data. Johnston said it’s possible for a company like Pepper to purchase data, whether from a prominent brand in the lingerie category like Victoria’s Secret or a big data marketplace, and then more accurately feed people small-bust ads, but given that completely boobless men are getting them, it’s unlikely it did. Beyond that, Johnston said Pepper could be targeting people based on who they follow—if they follow lots of female creators known for being fit and active, for instance—but that’s also inconclusive.
Johnston said it’s also possible that Pepper is just flush with marketing dollars following an investment, and is throwing them at every man, woman, and child it sees. Or, Farman hypothesized, “Maybe it’s cheaper to just target everybody and hope the message gets to the right person.”
To that end, experts wondered if changes to the online advertising landscape, particularly at X/Twitter/whatever it’s called, might also be affecting the situation. This year, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have chronicled X’s struggles to attract the same caliber of advertising it used to before Musk’s controversial takeover.
“If there are fewer advertisers spending in a given time, you’ll be able to reach more people for a lower dollar amount,” Johnston said. “That’s most likely what Pepper would be taking advantage of on a platform like X.” He added that X is offering many incentives to advertisers now to either win them back or keep them spending, and Pepper’s many ads could be the result of that as well.
But no matter the reason, it’s clear that Pepper’s campaign is not only relentless, but just plain weird. Farman said that people are pretty used to seeing “creepy” ads in this day and age, but the Pepper ones may represent a new frontier: We’re used to being tracked, but not by our bra size. “It’s just certain types of data and certain types of products where, even though we know companies use our data, it still pushes the limit with it for people,” she said. “Everyone’s kind of resigned to the fact that if I want free use of whatever the platform is, there’s going to be some advertising and they’re selling my data.” It’s when companies seemingly violate that covenant—with incredibly specific, vaguely inflammatory tracking—that it can really bother you.
When it comes to bust size, “it’s such a loaded topic,” Farman said. Women with small busts and larger busts are both capable of reacting negatively to these ads. “There’s so much emphasis right now on body positivity, and you don’t want to make people feel bad about themselves,” Farman said. “If you’re in the set of women who always had trouble finding bras at stores, you might see these ads and say, ‘OK, cry me a river.’ The people who really have a problem finding a bra are looking for bigger bras. They might say, ‘I really don’t want to keep seeing these ads in my feed of tiny women in these tiny bras, complaining about how they can’t find bras that fit them.’ ”
I wonder if all of this has been worth it for Pepper. I still haven’t encountered anyone who’s actually bought one of their bras. I asked Jenny, one of the people who keeps seeing the ads online, if she would consider purchasing one. “I mean, I wouldn’t go out of my way to get that particular brand, but if I’m shopping and it looked like it might fit, then why not?” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But maybe not a total bust.
