Healthcare. The Last Creative Revolution

Thinking back to when I first started in advertising feels like another lifetime. And in a sense, it was.

As a young copywriter, all I had to think about were mostly 30-second commercials and print ads. Great creative work was reserved for certain categories—German sports cars, running shoes, and occasionally some alcohol brands. Exceptional creativity certainly wasn’t ubiquitous across all product categories.

I remember clearly being fresh out of the Creative Circus, a creative portfolio school in Atlanta, and receiving a somewhat sheepish call from a recruiter about a junior copywriter position at Saatchi & Saatchi working on Tide.

“Tide? Are you kidding me? What would my classmates think?” I remember thinking to myself.

Needless to say, I passed on the position. Like any self-respecting creative, I spent the first two decades of my career trying (often in vain) to only work in categories with clear paths to creative awards and industry recognition.

Well, we all know how the Tide brand turned out when it came to great creative work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIW3l-ENHdA). And the list of brands and categories redefining creativity continues to grow. Remember when financial services were also creative purgatory? E-trade, Ally Bank, Citi Bank, and many others changed all of that.

The advertising creative revolution, first sparked in the 1960s, eventually reached household products and financial services. Yet for some reason, finding breakthrough creativity in healthcare is still as rare as finding someone sober at an Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day.

For far too long, there's been a division between "creative" and what many call "healthcare creative." But let’s be clear about what that actually means: healthcare creative is often held to a lower standard, and few expect it to deliver much.

How unfortunate.

Unfortunate because many brands and categories would love to tap into just a fraction of the powerful, emotional storytelling possibilities within healthcare. Our field is rich with innovation, life-saving medicine, hope, joy, and humanity—saving children’s lives, developing immunotherapies that fight cancer and other diseases, extending life, giving life, and pushing humanity into new frontiers.

If we can create compelling creative around fabricated benefits like “flavor-blasted” Cheetos, there’s simply no excuse for the lack of exceptional work in healthcare. The material here is authentic, emotional, and deeply rooted in human truths.

At Trailblazer, we believe the days of separating our category from the creative standards of other categories are over. As marketing and advertising professionals, we shouldn’t accept it. Modern brands can’t get away with it. Times change, and smart brands change with them.

Today, people choose brands that are authentic and evoke genuine emotions—happiness, confidence, safety, normalcy, humanity. A smiling doctor on a billboard next to a U.S. News & World Report badge doesn’t make anyone feel anything, except maybe a bit embarrassed as an advertising creative.

As healthcare marketers, we must begin acting like modern brands. We must be bold, fresh, relevant and authentic. We need to stop pretending that people automatically care about our messages and instead make them care.

Simply put, it’s time to stop doing “healthcare creative” and just start doing great creative.