Over the past few years, Instagram’s policy has been clear with female nipples, which cannot be shown in images on the social network. But this censorship, as often happens when a rule is imposed, has unleashed creativity. And the sex industry, accustomed to moving on the margins, is being one of the great laboratories of innovation in the use of formats and narratives to maximize attention.
An ingenuity that now manifests itself in a new form of “tactical eroticism” precisely on Instagram, where it has become a trend to show the naked chest using a brand’s product as partial coverage. This new visual code – a kind of non-consensual product placement – is the strategy that many content creators use to bypass Meta filters and redirect users to platforms like Only Fans. Thus, the Primor or Pedigree bag act as complicit links between the gaze that desires more and the creator who decides to show what is fair, with the product being the involuntary protagonist of that moment.
Videos of @giulidalmasso22 and @llunamartinezl
This pattern, increasingly common in Reels and Stories of users with accounts linked to Only Fans, raises a question for the marketing industry: how is brand exposure managed when it occurs in erotic content, unsolicited, but with millions of views? In a context marked by the need to define values and protect reputation, these types of appearances escape the traditional controls of the brand safety, since, apparently, No agreement is governing and there is no media planning that applies.
Some brands and their agencies will not have even detected the trend. Others probably see it as an anomaly with no major consequences. And the thing is, if attention is the most valuable asset in the digital ecosystem, why bother correcting something that is placing them at the center of the scene, even if it is erotic?
Brands have accepted, and celebrated, the existence of user-generated content for years. But that same principle, applied in an environment where sexualization is structural, becomes a boomerang that is difficult to manage. Because a brand cannot control how its product will be used, nor with what intention it will be integrated into another’s story. So there is no campaign capable of anticipating the gesture of someone who decides to place a can of Pepsi or some Milka cookies right where Instagram draws the limit of the algorithm.
Videos of @breesammylife_, @sofiaprettybabyy and @dariaroyce_
It is also true that the border between eroticism and commercial communication has begun to blur. The case of Urban Decay -owned by L’Oréal- is an example of this. This summer, the brand signed Ari Kytsya, creator of pornographic content on Only Fans, as an ambassador to promote a makeup line aimed primarily at teenagers, thus opening a new scenario in which brands embrace erotic environments as part of their narrative and are active protagonists in the sex industry.
The new brand safety scenario
In this context, social networks remain in functional limbo. Instagram has tightened its nudity policies in the last decade, but enforcement of its rules is erratic and algorithms don’t always detect what falls outside the obvious contours. This new practice therefore exploits a crack: the image broadly complies with the rules, but visually plays to suggest something else. A plausible hypothesis is that the use of such immediately recognizable brands acts as a decoy against the Meta algorithm, because when a logo appears in the foreground, the automatic detection system is “deviated” by the brand identifier.
Videos of @qtiepieeemolly, @giulidalmasso22 and @cutesophiexo
From reason.Why We have been able to verify that, although some of these videos are deleted, the profiles continue to be active. During the research days for this article, we have detected a total of 100 accounts and more than 2,000 videos from different Western countries. But none of them have been closed by Meta during this time, although around 20% of the videos have been deleted.
The visibility logic that applies in this case is that of users who convert other people’s products into extensions of their monetization strategy.
In any case, these types of accounts do not seek permanence. Their useful life is calculated and they are created with an implicit expiration due to the possibility of being detected and closed. In fact, many of them already include in their bio the link to a mirror account, ready to be activated when Meta suspends the original one. This ephemeral architecture is part of its logic, which consists of maximizing exposure for a few weeks, channeling attention to OnlyFans and continuing the cycle with another account.
From the outside it might seem that Meta does not act, but the point is that it does so when tens of thousands of views have already been achieved, traffic has been redirected and users have monetized.
The new scenario of brand safety therefore, it emerges as that one in which brands no longer decide whether or not to advertise on certain channels, but rather have to respond when they appear in an environment that, perhaps, is not the one they have chosen. And the logic of visibility that applies in this case is that of users who convert other people’s products into extensions of their own monetization strategy. They choose recognizable brands and show the logo directly to the camera. What’s more, in some cases, they verbalize the name of aspirational products that provide context and familiarity.
Videos of @alyycakex, @sofiaprettybabyy and @breesammylife_
On the other hand, it is difficult to think that, among all the possible options, a creator would choose a Pandora bag or a Philadelphia container at random. In an ecosystem of visual meanings, these brands are not only useful objects for the purpose being pursued. The gesture of showing the chest just behind the logo is a strategy and it is worth wondering if some will do it precisely to attract the attention of the brand itself, as a way of applying, even, as collaborators.
In fact, some creators choose to present the content as a paid collaboration, labeling the post as “collaboration” or “paid partnership.” This example, with almost 2.5 million views, reinforces the idea that this is a conscious monetization mechanic.
Video of @yourmomhopex
In all this matter, a generational tension also emerges. For a part of the public, these practices border on gratuitous provocation or exploitation of the body as currency. For another, they are part of a new framework of economic autonomy and freedom of expression. With mothers who tolerate it and daughters who professionalize it, the industry watches silently as the metrics continue to grow and feed the systematic sexualization of social platforms. Instagram and TikTok present themselves as general networks but, in practice, they have become scenarios where the line between lifestyle and sexual innuendo is increasingly diffuse. In this ecosystem, creators play with the use of brands, bordering on usage policies to turn commercial tangibles into aesthetic accomplices of their narrative. In some videos they even use products intended for children. Although the content is not explicit, the presence of brands associated with minors in this type of narrative generates a debate about ethical boundaries that are beginning to erode.
Videos of @alyycakex and @dariaroyce_
Strategy within chaos
If large multinationals – such as PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Unilever, Mondelēz or P&G – decided today to withdraw their investment from Meta until stricter control of the contexts in which their products appear was guaranteed, they could provoke a real transformation. It wouldn’t be the first time that the brand safety It becomes a negotiation lever, as has already happened on Twitter with political content or issues related to freedom of expression.
These contents often go unnoticed because they are encapsulated in algorithmic bubbles.
One of the great challenges for the social listening of brands is that this content often goes unnoticed because it is encapsulated in algorithmic bubbles. Today the Internet is an ecosystem in which one user sees something that another will never find. Thus, visibility is fragmented and monitoring is asymmetric. There are products that circulate in niches that those responsible for them do not frequent or know about. And this requires new listening systems, capable of detecting what is not labeled and what happens in plain sight, but in another digital reality.
With the addition that, when an agency detects the use of a product in a problematic context, the video has probably already completed its life cycle. In these contents it is so dizzying that the mere fact of scheduling a status meeting with the client sometimes means arriving late. This leaves brands in a position of constant reaction, without the ability to anticipate. Therefore, more agile technology systems and a culture of distributed surveillance are required, with protocols that activate alerts before a video of these characteristics disappears.
Although perhaps the industry should assume that lack of control is something inherent to the new digital order and that the brand story has been decentralized. Marketing managers will not be able to restore impossible control, but they will learn to operate with strategy within the chaos. With artificial intelligence there will be more sophisticated tools, but it will also be necessary to accept that the brand narrative is, today, a floating force that coexists with other narratives. Some more uncomfortable; others irreverent; and most unpredictable.
