Introduction

I sat down last week and watched about twenty healthcare ads in a row. Hospital systems, DSOs, dermatology platforms, orthopedic groups, a couple of infusion brands, a Medicare Advantage plan.

Every single one was serious.

Soft piano. Slow-motion sunlight through a window. A provider putting a hand on someone’s shoulder. A voiceover about “the moments that matter.” Cut to logo. Cut to tagline about compassionate, patient-centered care.

Twenty ads. Zero jokes. Zero smirks. Zero acknowledgments that the actual experience of being a patient is, most of the time, mildly ridiculous — waiting rooms, gowns that don’t close, forms that ask the same question four times, a receptionist who mispronounces your name every visit for six years.

The category has decided that serious equals trustworthy. And it’s wrong.

1. Why Healthcare Marketing Defaults to Serious

A marketing director at a PE-backed platform gets a creative brief approved. Legal reviews it. Compliance reviews it. The CEO reviews it. The operating partner reviews it. Somewhere in that chain, someone says: “Let’s not be too clever here. This is healthcare.”

And what they mean is: “I don’t want to get a phone call.”

Nobody has ever gotten a phone call about a beige campaign. Nobody has ever been pulled into a meeting because their ad was too safe. So the whole category defaults to safe, which means the whole category defaults to sameness — the same problem I wrote about in the Positioning issue, showing up in a different room of the same house.

“Serious isn’t a strategy. It’s just the version of the ad that survives the approval process.”

The result is a category where every platform looks like every other platform, and the only lever left is spend. Same problem, different symptom.

2. The Comedy Campaigns That Actually Worked

“Be funnier” is not a strategy either. So let me be specific. These are healthcare campaigns that were unmistakably comedic and unmistakably effective.

British Heart Foundation, “Vinnie Jones Hands-Only CPR.” A former Premier League enforcer teaches bystander CPR to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive,” treating the person on the ground like a member of his crew. It’s absurd. It’s also credited with directly saving 30+ lives from people who remembered the technique in a real emergency. Comedy attached to a life-or-death behavior, and the comedy is what made the behavior stick.

CeraVe’s “Michael Cera” Super Bowl campaign. An absurdist conspiracy that the actor secretly formulates the cream. Sales up 25%. One of the most-talked-about Super Bowl spots of the year. The joke bought the attention. The brand delivered the message.

UnitedHealthcare’s humor pivot. Health insurance is not a category anyone associates with a laugh. UHC leaned into it anyway and moved awareness, trust, and memorability in a direction most of their competitors are still assuming they can’t. If a national payer can do it, your dermatology platform can do it.

Zocdoc “Hockey Teeth” (the dental one). Two hockey players missing their front teeth try to book a dentist through lisping, tooth-gapped dialogue. It’s the rare U.S. dental-adjacent ad that actually earns a laugh, and the joke is aimed at the awkwardness of needing the dentist — never at dentistry itself. Every DSO CMO I know should watch this and ask why their own creative can’t get within a mile of it.

BetterHelp, “Sometimes You Just Need Some Help.” A hairdresser who is obviously not a therapist. A cowboy tries to walk off a snake bite. A guy pinned under a barbell insists he’s fine. Every spot is about refusing help you obviously need, and the payoff is a plug for therapy. It’s a real, national U.S. mental health service running comedic broadcast creative that treats asking for help as the joke, not the diagnosis. Almost nobody in the therapy category is doing that.

“Five campaigns, five different corners of the category. One common thread: the humor is aimed at the patient experience, never at the clinical work.”

3. What Actually Makes Healthcare Comedy Work

If you strip these campaigns down, the pattern is clear. The winners do one of three things. The losers try to do a fourth thing and get punished for it.

  1. 01
    Punch at the awkwardness the patient already feels.

    The waiting room. The gown. The intake form. The Google-your-symptoms spiral. The mispronounced name. Patients already feel this stuff. When a brand actually says it, the patient recognizes themselves in the ad. Recognition moves people. Being informed doesn’t.

  2. 02
    Attach humor to a behavior, not a condition.

    You can be funny about the action you want the patient to take — get the exam, learn the CPR technique, book the appointment — even when the underlying condition is deadly serious. Vinnie Jones is not making jokes about cardiac arrest. He’s making jokes about doing CPR. BetterHelp isn’t making jokes about mental illness. It’s making jokes about refusing help. Miss that distinction and the campaign falls apart. Get it right and it’s the whole reason it works.

  3. 03
    Use an unexpected character device to earn attention.

    CeraVe/Michael Cera. Vinnie Jones. UnitedHealthcare’s absurdist creative. The device buys memorability a straight message can’t. Then the brand delivers a real, clear point. The joke earns the attention. It doesn’t replace the message.

And the one to avoid: don’t make the illness itself the joke. This is the fear that keeps every other brand beige, and it’s the one real rule. If your comedy targets the diagnosis, the treatment, or the clinical outcome, you should get the phone call. Laugh with the patient about the experience around care. Never laugh at the care.

4. The Monday Morning Version

You don’t need a Super Bowl budget for this. You don’t need a rebrand. You just need one weird, real thing about being a patient at your practice that nobody in marketing has bothered to put in an ad yet.

Sit down with three people. Your best front desk person. Your best provider. Your best patient, the one who’s been coming for six years and would text you if you asked. Ask each of them the same question. What’s the weirdest, most awkward, most human part of being a patient here?

Write it all down. Don’t clean it up.

“One of those answers is your next campaign.”

Your competitors are not going to out-serious you. Everyone in the category already sounds like a funeral home. But somebody in your specialty is about to be the first one to sound like a person, and that brand is going to be really hard to catch.

So here’s my offer. If you’re a healthcare brand actually willing to take the swing, we want to build the campaign with you. We’ll go get the celebrity. We’ll bring in the comedy writers. We’ll build something your category doesn’t have the nerve to run, and we’ll do it in a way that doesn’t get you fired by your board or your GC. You just have to be brave enough to be first in your specialty. First is worth a lot more than fifth.

Hit reply if that’s you, or even if you’re just curious what it might look like for your platform. I’ll make time for the conversation.

— Matt