On October 7, 2026, Medical Marketing & Media published new results from Organon's campaign with former Bachelorette and two-time New York Times bestselling romance author Hannah Brown. MediaPost first covered the campaign on October 1. Organon published "Lessons in Love and Ballroom" this summer. It is a Brown-authored short romance about a dancer, drawn partly from Brown's win on Dancing with the Stars, and it includes a conversation about contraception. In one scene a character admits she keeps forgetting her daily pill. Her friend says she stopped worrying about that because her doctor "recommended a long-acting, reversible option."

Why It Matters

The sexual-wellness and contraception industry has spent years blocked by ad platforms that reject sex-adjacent creative. Organon's approach gets around that: publish fiction, keep the product mention in a separate author's note, and let entertainment media distribute it. Romance is one of publishing's biggest-selling genres, and its readership skews toward the reproductive-age women who are Nexplanon's target market. Placing a LARC conversation inside the story, rather than an ad next to it, is a format other pharma and pleasure brands could copy. It also shows the limits. Thirty-one thousand readers is small next to a TV buy, and the 3.6M impression figure comes from Organon, not an audit. Still, for regulated sexual-health products barred from most paid channels, branded content works as an alternative to standard ads. It also builds on Organon's move this summer into hormone-free contraception with Miudella, the copper IUD. Expect more campaigns that run through creators and entertainment formats rather than conventional ads.

The story itself doesn't name a brand. The product appears in an author's note after the story, which discusses Nexplanon, Organon's arm implant that prevents pregnancy for up to five years, with indication, safety information and a link. Janine Colavita, Organon's head of product communications and corporate reputation, told MM+M that keeping the dialogue unbranded protected the story's tone and made it easier to get through medical, legal and regulatory review. She said she rarely sees birth control in romance fiction, "despite contraception's obvious connection to sex and family planning."

Organon says the numbers beat expectations. The story had about 31,000 readers by the end of September, against a goal of 12,000, and the campaign has generated more than 3.6 million combined TikTok and Instagram impressions. Brown promoted it to her roughly 4 million followers, backed by paid amplification. The earned-media push placed coverage in OK!, E! News and Us Weekly, syndicated across about 45 outlets. "We would never be able to get a traditional birth control story in [some of those publications]," Colavita said.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-08

Initial entry — story first created.