When health start-up Eucalyptus launched in 2019, its four founders could hardly have predicted that a little-known diabetes drug, GLP-1 would take them to a $1.6 billion sale in just seven years.
Fast-forward to today, and ads for the start-up’s telehealth service Juniper are unavoidable, with everything from celebrity TV spots to Black Friday deals introducing Australians to fast-track weight-loss GLP-1 drugs Wegovy and Mounjaro.
How Eucalyptus achieved this in Australia — one of the world’s strictest regulatory markets for pharmaceutical marketing — is, in the words of a former medical marketer, “arguably one of the best examples of circumnavigating the rules ever seen.”
Mumbrella interviewed the marketer on the condition of anonymity.
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“What they’re doing is damn clever,” they said. “Their advertisements are focused on communicating the service rather than promoting the medication, but they are walking a fine line.”
Last month, Eucalyptus announced its sale to US obesity drugs giant Hims & Hers Health for more than $1.6 billion, netting it major pay day for founders, including its CEO Tim Doyle, Benny Kleist, Alexey Mitko and former ad-lander Charlie Gearside.
Targeted largely at women struggling with their weight, Eucalyptus’ Juniper is a telehealth provider that connects patients with private doctors able to prescribe GLP‑1 drugs under the brand names Wegovy and Mounjaro.
Once prescribed, the medications are aesthetically packaged and delivered monthly, with fees ranging from $249 to $599 (again, monthly), depending on the plan and level of support.
Although not the only telehealth service offering these drugs—Eucalyptus’ men-targeted Pilot and rival Mosh also provide them—Juniper is by far the most visible GLP‑1 provider in Australia, thanks to its parent company’s $103-million marketing blitz over the past two years.
Advertisements can be seen on billboards:
On public transport:
Countless online advertisements and testimonials:
And the one that really caused a stir among eating disorder organisations was a Black Friday deal offering Juniper services — and by proxy, GLP-1 treatments — at discounted rates.
The scale and visibility of Juniper’s marketing are remarkable.
Laws set by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) entirely prohibit advertising or marketing prescription medicines directly to consumers in Australia, a category that includes GLP‑1 drugs.
Breaching these rules can carry severe consequences, including hefty fines, and even the risk of losing the company’s licence. Last year the TGA fined Midnight Health $198,000 for promoting weight-loss drugs.
However, Juniper appears to have landed in what Nicole Papoutsis of Walk This Way Marketing describes as a legal grey area of “indirect” advertising, where a brand can promote its services but must avoid making any explicit reference to specific medications.
“That’s been sort of the go-to for many healthcare organisations,” Papoutsis, who previously led marketing for fertility brand Genea, told Mumbrella. “You’re marketing the disease or the condition; the lifestyle and that aspiration first, and then [the brand] encourages you to go and speak with your healthcare provider.
“You have the line between education and promotion, and those guardrails are in place from a regulatory point of view.
“But I think it’s definitely being pushed by marketers and some of those really high growth healthcare startups; they’ve got high expectations, ROI-focused investors.”
“This line between education and promotion gets crossed when that risk of taking that prescription medicine is minimised, or those benefits are framed as lifestyle upgrades, and that clinical nuance is really replaced with emotional aspiration.”
One of the more striking examples of where Juniper may be testing the limits appears on its Youtube channel, where “Kevin, a lead pharmacist at Juniper,” films himself unboxing a delivery package in the style of an influencer opening a PR parcel — except the contents are the drug Mounjaro.
In others, Kevin again appears, discussing Mounjaro price rises, suggesting viewers “consider Wegovy instead”, and even demonstrates how to use a Mounjaro KwikPen.
In all of these examples, the pharmaceutical brands are explicitly referenced, and even shown on screen, in what would ordinarily constitute a clear breach of TGA advertising rules.
For Mumbrella’s anoymous source, a former pharmaceutical marketer with extensive experience navigating the TGA’s regulations, this specific case is more complicated.
“Most of [Juniper’s ads] don’t talk about the drug in the campaign work, but they highlight the problem and say: ‘Medical weight-loss treatment may be suitable for you, but a doctor will make the decision.’”
“These, though, are sailing very close to the wind.”
According to the source, several factors may explain how videos like these have avoided regulatory scrutiny.
One is that the material could also be argued to be educational content, rather than promotional advertising, they said.
The videos are hosted online, a space generally subject to lighter regulatory scrutiny than traditional advertising channels in Australia, and appear to originate from Juniper’s UK-hosted Youtube channel.
By contrast, Juniper’s Australia-hosted channel has only one video, while the UK-hosted channel contains 62.
In a statement to Mumbrella about the Youtube videos specifically, a Eucalyptus spokesperson said:
“Juniper UK operates with a separate patient base and marketing team to Juniper AU. All educational and marketing content hosted in the UK is solely intended for Juniper patients in that market, and is produced in the context of local regulations. This content is not targeted towards Australian audiences.”
Despite this claim, the channel contains several videos featuring Australian participants, including one short that explicitly references Australian women.
The American influence
Undoubtedly, the heart of Australia’s pharma-regulatory grey area is the surge of online platforms and social media, which expose consumers to content from markets with far looser advertising rules, especially the United States.
The US has long been known for its prolific pharmaceutical advertising, governed by more relaxed direct-to-consumer regulations, but with the caveat that companies must list every potential side effect—often in a rapid-fire, nearly incomprehensible disclaimer at the end of each commercial.
Unsurprisingly, the allure of rapid weight loss offered by GLP‑1 drugs has unleashed a Pandora’s Box of aspirational online content actively promoting the medications, especially from social media influencers and high-profile celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Serena Williams.
Tennis legend and new face of GLP-1 drugs, Serena Williams
It’s a marketing gold mine of epic proportions: pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, owner of Ozempic and Wegovy, spent around US$500 million on US advertising for the drugs in the first nine months of 2025.
The most recent example saw Hollywood actor Justin Long front a Super Bowl ad for Ozempic, though in typical US pharmaceutical fashion, much of the commercial focused on rapidly listing the drug’s potential side effects.
This overwhelming cross-border marketing wave, according to Papoutsis, has contributed to what she calls a “really strange hybrid market”.
“You’ve got really high consumer awareness about these specific pharmaceutical, branded drugs, but the regulatory responsibility still sits with the clinicians and the producers of those,” she said.
Stuart Black, CEO of health and wellness marketing specialist agency The Ward Marketing Group, said that the risks of this proliferation include a surge of misleading or distorted information, which can confuse consumers and complicate regulatory oversight.
“Consumers can go online and see information from other markets where direct-to-consumer advertising is allowed,” he said. “There’s a massive amount of misinformation on the internet, which our regulations could do better to manage.”
When contacted by Mumbrella, the TGA said it does not comment on specific cases, nor on how it monitors online content, particularly that originating from overseas.
However, it confirmed it had “requested the removal” of 3,000 “unlawful advertisements,” including entire profiles, relating to wellness products—some linked to weight-loss.
“We continue to actively monitor online content for potentially unlawful advertising of therapeutic goods and partner with various digital platforms to identify and address alleged breaches when they occur,” a spokesperson added.
Mumbrella also understands that advertisements promoting a health service, where the ultimate purpose is to obtain a specific prescription-only medicine, are likely to be considered advertising of prescription-only medicines and could constitute a legal breach.
These laws, however, have done little to slow the meteoric uptake of GLP‑1 drugs.
A UNSW study found that private spending on GLP‑1 medications exceeded $1 billion last year, with six million monthly injection kits sold in Australia between July 2024 and April 2025.
Juniper itself does not report sales, but its parent company, the newly minted Eucalyptus, posted almost A$250 million in revenue last financial year—more than double the A$120.9 million recorded the year prior.
And now, under the ownership of US-based weight-loss service Hims & Hers Health, Juniper and Eucalyptus have unbridled access to an audience whose appetite for these drugs shows no signs of being sated.
Eucalyptus declined to be interviewed for this article.