Health advertising spans a wide range of companies, including consumer health businesses, wellness apps, pharmaceutical giants and startups, over-the-counter medication providers, telehealth services, and more. Some companies have to follow regulatory compliance and ethical standards in their marketing, depending on the industry and where they’re promoting products.
Health businesses succeed in their advertising by focusing on how they can improve users’ lives. In a crowded field, there’s plenty of opportunity to get creative visually and verbally, educate their prospects, and build brand authority and promise with every campaign.
Health ads can provide important education and awareness, playing a role in public health and understanding disease. Digital marketers across health companies have an opportunity to connect to emotions and tell human stories.
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7 of the Best Ad Creatives in Health (and Why)
Health advertising has to stand out to cut through user and creative fatigue. Display ads, landing pages, engaging social, and varying types of ad formats will all play a role in success. Here are seven great health ad creatives that broke through the noise, to inspire your own work.
1. Pfizer’s Preventive Care
If you’ve got the budget for a celebrity spot in your ads, make sure it’s fun and gets the message across. Pfizer’s Covid vaccination ad with American football player Travis Kelce showed off the athlete’s strength, and his endorsement for getting regular vaccinations. It was well-timed, as Covid vaccination rates showed steady decline in the U.S., and brought light to a topic that can be mundane or easily forgotten. It was also light-hearted, bringing the humor (Kelce’s mom) that pharma companies don’t always embrace in their advertising.
Brands can use health ads like this to educate viewers on the importance of preventive care, as well as reinforce their own authority in a particular market — in this case, Pfizer reminded audiences that they were an inventor of the Covid vaccine.
2. Brushing Basics
Colgate’s work in underserved communities around the world, donating toothbrushes and toothpaste to kids who don’t have dental care access, was on display in its “Bright Smiles, Bright Futures” campaign. It’s a fine line to walk for a brand to humbly brag about charitable work, but Colgate’s ad creative used joyful videos to focus on smiling kids to tell their story.
Using video, a voiceover, and a few key numbers, such as the number of years they’ve worked in South Africa and number of kids they’ve helped, created an impactful ad that backs up Colgate’s brand promise — and reinforces why a basic act like tooth brushing is essential.
3. A Mascot, Done Well
Remember the Nasonex bee? The animated mascot, voiced by Antonio Banderas, actually broke through the crowded field of over-the-counter allergy medications. The bee’s adventures, either led or stymied by seasonal allergy symptoms, were entertaining, informative, and made the brand name recognizable. Drug mascots or cartoons can fall flat or induce cringe, but the bee hit it just right. With lots of competition in this particular subset of medications, Nasonex found a way to stand out in the pharmacy aisle.
4. Destigmatizing Mental Health Care
During a time of increased mental health care needs, a shortage of therapists, and an increase in online healthcare platforms, BetterHelp stepped in with a broad campaign across video, social media, TV spots, and podcast ads. Its “Open Up” ad got real with a woman facing a crisis, then working through her panic with an online counselor. BetterHelp’s ads opened the door for more, similar telehealth therapy services that promise easy, fast access to counselors.
BetterHelp quickly established its brand as a modern, useful service for tech-savvy prospective patients. Its platform connects patients with licensed, established mental health counselors, and by early 2025 counted more than 5 million users.
5. Introducing a New Vaccine
How to tell the story of a new vaccine that can prevent sexually transmitted cancers? The team behind the launch of Merck’s Gardasil had to both introduce a product and educate a swath of the public on a disease and treatment many may never have heard of. The advertising around the product was a mix of both branded and unbranded, focusing primarily on educating parents on why they should vaccinate their kids and at what age. Merck has used a mix of approaches over the years of marketing Gardasil, talking directly to teens as well as parents.
This is an example of advertising that succeeded both in revenue — almost 40% growth in sales to $5.7 billion in 2021 — and in public health, with nearly 60% of adolescents vaccinated within a few years. Healthcare marketing like this can promote understanding of a topic among prospective patients and promote long-term wellbeing.
6. Broadening Beauty Standards
For many years, print and TV ads for beauty products were pretty standard: Airbrushed, softly lit women photographed in closeup. Or TV ads which showed something similar, with off-camera fans gently blowing a flawless woman’s hair. Beauty products company Dove shifted those trends when it launched its “Real Beauty” campaign to take on female self-image. It brought images of all kinds of women, of all sizes, ages, races, and more, showing them head-on, often without makeup — something creative in the beauty industry hadn’t shown before.
Dove’s initial success led to more iterations of the concept across TV, social media, billboards, and more, most recently encouraging girls to stick with sports with the #keepherconfident tag. They’ve taken on self-criticism, encouraged female role models and, in the process, raised Dove’s profile and rebranded it as a female-first, empowering brand while also rewiring typical beauty standards.
7. Generating User Content
In the beauty arena, especially skincare, user-generated content (UGC) is hugely popular and profitable for businesses. When agency Evolut analyzed a number of beauty ads, more than a third of the successful ads were in this UGC format — more than single image, video, or carousel formats.
This LANEIGE still is a perfect example of the UGC trend, having actual users and/or influencers use the product live, whether it’s a product demo, unboxing video, or before-and-after makeover. Consider how to incorporate this type of authenticity to appeal to your users and attract new prospects.
Key Takeaways
Health advertising is a crowded field, spanning the gamut from prescription medication to consumer wellness products. To stand out, focus your creative on the human impact, the positive outcomes of the product or service, and use the opportunity for education and facts wherever possible.
