With a dental practice, a clinic or any kind of private healthcare, you’re asking people to trust you with something very personal. Most of your future patients have been putting it off for years, they’re nervous, and they’ve no real way of telling one practice from another. On top of that, you’re working under stricter advertising rules than almost anybody else.
Trust has to come before anything else, because nobody books a consultation with a practice they feel unsure about, and building it is something television is particularly good at. We’ve written before about why TV is the most trusted place to advertise, and a practice can put that to good use once it understands why its patients are holding back.
Why people put it off
Dentistry shows the problem most clearly, because there it has been measured. In the Adult Oral Health Survey 2023, published by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities in December 2025, 15% of the adults in England who had natural teeth scored at a level of dental anxiety that may indicate a phobia, and a further 40% were moderately anxious. Money comes into it too, because 23% of all the adults surveyed said that cost had led them to delay dental treatment.
Behind figures like those are people who made up their minds long ago that they’d like something done. Think of somebody who chipped a front tooth in their twenties and has smiled with their mouth closed in photographs ever since, or somebody who’s been turning the television up for a couple of years and blaming the actors for mumbling. Neither of them needs persuading that there’s a problem, and what holds them back is not knowing what the treatment involves, what it will cost, whether it’ll hurt and who they can trust to do it.
A page of search results does very little to settle any of that, whereas television can settle much of it before the first appointment. People can see your team and your surroundings, which takes away a lot of the nervousness that stops them booking, and a practice that’s on television comes across as professional and here to stay. It also reaches people who aren’t looking, which matters a great deal here, because somebody who has been meaning to do something about their teeth or their eyesight for years isn’t searching for it this week, and your advert can be the nudge. You only pay for your own area, too, since your patients come from a limited distance and the advert can be shown only to the households within it, postcode by postcode.
What a good healthcare advert looks like
Warmth and reassurance do far more in this sector than a hard sell, because what people want to feel is that they’ll be listened to and looked after. Real members of your team are usually better than actors, since they’re the people a new patient is going to meet, and the rules allow health professionals to appear in an advert for their own practice as long as they’re suitably qualified in what they’re talking about. A calm, friendly tone suits them better than a script full of selling points, and it’s also much easier for people who aren’t performers to deliver.
As a rule, it’s better to show the outcome than the procedure. The advert will be seen in living rooms in the middle of the evening, and somebody who’s nervous of the dentist doesn’t want a close-up of the instruments, whereas a person laughing without a second thought shows them what the treatment is for. It also helps to make the first step a small one. A free consultation or an open evening is far easier to say yes to than a course of treatment, and it lets people find out what’s involved and what it would cost before they’ve agreed to anything. Whoever answers the phone when they ring is part of the same impression, so make sure your front desk knows when the campaign starts.
Often the most persuasive voice is a patient’s, which is the thinking behind our advert for The Smile Spa. Made with the agency SD Advertising, it blends real-life testimonials with footage of the practice, so it’s built on a real success story, which is far more convincing than anything we could have written in a script. As part of the same project we created social media content that goes further into the patients’ stories, and into how coming to The Smile Spa has made a difference to their lives as well as their smiles. There’s a separate article on using real customers in a TV ad, which applies to patients just as well.
Not all health advertising is selling something, of course. With the same agency we made a winter campaign for the NHS, where the job was public information: A&E departments come under extra strain every winter, some of it avoidable, and the advert was there to remind people of that. We used a “guess who” style graphic effect, created by our in-house graphic designers and combined with existing material supplied by the client, and kept the tone relaxed, because an important message doesn’t have to be delivered in a stern way. You can also watch our advert for Beat Covid NE.
The rules are stricter here
Health is one of the most closely controlled areas of advertising, for good reason, because some of the people watching are worried or unwell, and a misleading claim can do them real harm. The rules for television are set out in the broadcast advertising code’s section on medicines, treatments and health, and Clearcast applies them when it checks an advert on the broadcasters’ behalf. If you’re planning a campaign, expect the following.
- Any claim about what a treatment does has to be backed by solid evidence, and Clearcast will ask for it. You’ll also be asked to show that the people providing the treatment have suitable credentials, such as their qualifications, registration and insurance.
- You can’t promise or imply a guaranteed result.
- Prescription-only medicines can’t be advertised to the public, and that affects how some cosmetic treatments can be described. The same ban applies in print and online, and the ASA’s advice on prescription-only medicines for those media names Botox and weight-loss injections among its examples.
- Before-and-after images have to be genuine and typical, and can’t be retouched.
- Testimonials must be real, and can’t make claims you couldn’t make yourself.
- The code restricts well-known people from presenting or recommending a medicine or treatment, so if you have a famous face in mind, tell us early and we’ll check with Clearcast what’s possible.
- Adverts mustn’t play on people’s insecurities, or make them anxious about their health without good reason, and there are extra protections around anything that might appeal to under-18s. Since May 2022, for instance, adverts for cosmetic procedures can’t be shown during or next to programmes that are made for under-18s or likely to appeal particularly to them.
Your own professional regulator will have requirements too. The General Dental Council’s guidance on advertising, for example, only allows a dentist to be called a specialist if they’re on one of its specialist lists, which is an easy thing to get wrong in a script. We’d always recommend having your compliance lead look at the script alongside us, and we’ll take it to Clearcast before anything is filmed. There’s more on how that works in our guide to Clearcast.
Stricter rules don’t have to mean a duller advert, because what they really require is that it’s built on who you are and how you treat people, and not on big promises. In our experience that makes for better advertising, and it’s what patients respond to.
A first conversation
The things we’d ask about first are which treatments or services you’d like more enquiries for and how far your patients travel. We’ll put our thinking into a storyboard, so that you and your clinical lead can see the advert, and read every word of it, before anything is made. To see how that might look for your own practice, ask for a free storyboard or get in touch, and you’ll find the adverts mentioned here among our health work.
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