Background
This ruling forms part of a wider piece of work on prescription-only medicines (POMs) used for weight loss, identified for investigation following complaints and intelligence gathered by the ASA.
See also related rulings published between 9 July 2025 and 4 November 2026.
Ad description
An Instagram story from MedExpress’ account, @medexpressglobal, seen on 24 June 2026, featured an image of a semi-transparent blue bottle labelled “MedExpress”, which contained white pills. Large on-screen text stated, “New weight loss tablets”, Smaller text next to the bottle stated, “Once daily pill”, “No needles”, “Coming soon” and “Join the waitlist”.
Issue
The complainant challenged whether the ad breached the Code, because it promoted a POM to the public.
Response
MedExpress Enterprises Ltd, t/a MedExpress, said that they endeavoured to ensure that their advertising content met all required standards. They said that a routine review of their advertising content, carried out prior to being made aware of the complaint by the ASA, had led them to discontinue the ad. They said it had been removed from all platforms and would not be used in the format complained about in future. After receiving notification of the complaint, they had subsequently started a broader review of content on customer-facing pages across their website and landing pages linked to by online ads.
Assessment
Upheld
The CAP Code stated that POMs or prescription-only medical treatments must not be advertised to the public.
The ASA understood that the Wegovy (semaglutide) tablet was the first oral GLP-1 tablet to be approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), and was licensed as a POM on 11 June 2026. Private availability followed in July 2026.
In assessing the likely consumer understanding of the ad, the ASA had regard to its consumer research “How people interpret ads relating to prescription-only weight-loss medicines”, published in April 2026. We acknowledged that the research was conducted before oral prescription-only weight-loss medicines were licensed in the UK, and therefore did not specifically examine consumers’ understanding of those products. Nevertheless, we considered that the research provided useful evidence of how consumers interpreted references, imagery and other features in advertising for weight-loss medicines, while recognising that each ad must be assessed on its own overall presentation.
Overall, the research demonstrated that consumers often inferred meaning from the combination of an ad's imagery, language, claims and overall presentation. Even where a medicine was not explicitly named, those combined signals could lead consumers to understand that a weight-loss POM was being promoted.
In light of that research, we considered that many consumers would have interpreted the references in the ad to “New weight loss tablets”, “Once daily pill”, and “No needles”, combined with the image of white pills in a MedExpress branded bottle, to mean that a prescription-only weight-loss medicine was being promoted. We further noted that the ad had been seen in late June 2026, at a time when the Wegovy oral tablet had recently been approved in the UK and had received significant press coverage, as private availability was about to be rolled out, which we considered added to the impression that the ad promoted a prescription-only weight-loss medicine. Taking the above factors into account, we considered the wording and image used in the ad promoted POMs to the public, and therefore breached the Code.
We sought advice from the MHRA, who noted that an objective assessment of an ad is required to determine whether it can be regarded as designed to promote a medicinal product or medicinal products. Such an assessment required consideration of a number of factors which may include the wording used in the ad and whether the material is designed to persuade, the likely effect on an average well-informed consumer, and the method by which it is distributed.
We also considered the consumer journey. The ad linked to a landing page on the MedExpress website which included text that stated “Wegovy Pill”, “Lose an average 16.6%* of your body weight in 64 weeks”, “No injection needed”, “Contains semaglutide, which helps you feel fuller and reduces cravings”, and an image of a white pill with the branding “novo”. It also featured a table comparing the Wegovy pill to a Wegovy injection pen and a Mounjaro injection pen, which included images of the pill and the injection pens, which bore the branding for Wegovy and Mounjaro. We understood that Wegovy (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide) were both classed as POMs.
The MHRA also expressed concern that the advertisement was likely to lead to the use of a POM in circumstances where the consumer had been invited to follow a discrete path which guided them, even if the promotional message was spread across a number of pages, to those weight-loss medicines.
Because the ad directed consumers to a website landing page that featuring named POMs, we further concluded that the ad advertised a POM to the public, and breached the Code.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 12.12 (Medicines, medical devices, health-related products and beauty products).
Action
The ad must not appear again in the form investigated. We told MedExpress Enterprises Ltd, t/a MedExpress not to promote POMs to the public in future.
