Tracking targeted advertising on intimate hygiene products

Source: Unsplash

A recent article by Dr Emmalee Ford for ABC News reported on some early results from research into social media advertising for “intimate hygiene” products which target and amplify consumer insecurities. The research conducted as part of the Australian Ad Observatory project used the Australian Internet Observatory’s data donation tools to collect ads from participants via a mobile application.

While the public discussion often focuses on individual ads or product claims, the more difficult problem for research is how to observe personalised advertising systems at population scale, given that ads are customised, transient, and variably delivered across users. The article includes a discussion on how Dr Giselle Newton from the University of Queensland used the Australian Internet Observatory’s Mobile Observation Ad Toolkit with the Screen Tracking feature to capture and analyse intimate hygiene advertising as it appears in everyday social media feeds.

As Dr Newton notes in the ABC article, intimate hygiene ads can be difficult to track precisely because they are personalised and can “vanish after you have seen them”. This creates an evidentiary gap for public health and platform accountability: harms may be widely experienced, but remain methodologically “invisible” without dedicated capture infrastructure.

Study design: Citizen science data donation at scale

Dr Newton describes accessing more than 175,000 ads from the social media feeds of at least 400 Australians via a national citizen science project at the Australian Ad Observatory.

This design is notable because it samples encountered ads (exposure), rather than relying only on advertiser libraries or platform-provided transparency interfaces, which may not support analyses of delivery cadence, sequencing, or the full variety of creatives shown to different users.

Source: Unsplash

Why this matters for health governance

The ABC article situates intimate hygiene advertising within regulatory boundaries between cosmetic and therapeutic claims, and notes the challenges regulators face in monitoring unlawful advertising at digital scale. Methodologically, the key point is that enforcement and policy debates depend on being able to evidence what consumers are actually shown.

Screen-based, participant-mediated capture provides a practical way to surface categories of advertising that are simultaneously widespread and difficult to audit, particularly where potential harms relate to health misinformation, risk normalisation, or deterrence from seeking appropriate care.

Read the original article on the ABC Website
First published 13 Jan 2026