There is a phrase we hear constantly in advertising: attention is the new currency. In healthcare, I would argue that attention alone was never enough. Trust is the real currency, and that is why Dubai’s decision to strengthen the standards around medical advertising on social media is something I believe our industry should strongly welcome.
I personally think this is a brilliant move by the Dubai authorities. Healthcare communication has evolved incredibly quickly over the past few years, particularly across social media, and the way people discover and consume health information today is completely different from even five years ago. The regulation around it naturally needs to evolve as well.
A patient today may hear about a treatment for the first time while scrolling through Instagram or TikTok rather than sitting in a doctor’s office. They may learn about a procedure from an influencer, discover a condition through a Reel, or start questioning whether they have a particular health issue because an algorithm has repeatedly served them similar content. The lines between health information, education, influence and advertising have become increasingly blurred.
For those of us working in advertising and communications, this creates both a responsibility and a very interesting creative challenge.
Healthcare has entered the attention economy
Healthcare brands are now competing for attention in exactly the same feeds as beauty, fashion, food, entertainment and travel. The problem is that the mechanics that work extremely well for many of those categories do not necessarily translate into healthcare.
Social algorithms reward simple, confident messages, while medicine often requires context and nuance. Advertising naturally looks for powerful claims, while science requires those claims to be supported by evidence. Creators are rewarded for engagement, while healthcare professionals and healthcare brands carry a much greater responsibility because the information they communicate can potentially influence decisions about someone’s health.
This is where I believe the new standards are particularly important. Greater emphasis on factual, reliable and substantiated communication should not be seen by agencies as another restriction on creativity. It should push us to become more creative.
The challenge for our industry is not simply how to make healthcare communication compliant. The much more interesting question is how we make responsible healthcare communication as engaging and compelling as everything else competing for people’s attention.
Regulation should not make healthcare advertising boring
Anyone who has worked in healthcare advertising knows what can happen when regulation enters the creative process. We add disclaimers, increase approval layers, make the copy safer and gradually everything starts looking and sounding similar.
I don’t believe that should be the outcome here.
We should instead be asking ourselves how we can turn complex science into stories people actually want to engage with. How can we make evidence interesting without exaggerating it? How can we create culturally relevant healthcare campaigns without oversimplifying the medicine? How can we work with influencers to educate as well as engage? And how can healthcare professionals build strong digital profiles while maintaining the credibility and responsibility expected from their profession?
I believe all of this is possible. But it requires agencies to understand healthcare at a much deeper level and to bring medical understanding into the creative conversation much earlier.
We need to rethink the healthcare influencer
The rise of health influencers, and particularly healthcare professionals becoming creators themselves, has been one of the most interesting developments in healthcare communication.
Influencer marketing has traditionally been built around metrics such as reach, engagement, views and follower counts. In healthcare, those metrics still matter, but I believe we need to add another one: responsibility.
The person with the biggest following is not automatically the right person to deliver a healthcare message. We need to look at credibility, relevance, medical accuracy, audience quality and, importantly, the potential impact of the content alongside traditional performance metrics.
This responsibility also cannot sit entirely with the creator. It belongs to everyone involved in producing that communication, including the healthcare organisation, the brand, the agency, the strategy team and the creative team.
If our influencer brief is designed to maximise engagement without giving equal consideration to accuracy, context and patient understanding, then we are applying a traditional consumer marketing model to a category where the consequences can be very different.
The role of the healthcare agency is changing
I think there is a broader conversation here about what clients should expect from their communications partners.
Healthcare marketing can no longer operate as a specialist adaptation that happens at the end of the creative process. As healthcare becomes more consumerised and conversations around health increasingly happen in mainstream culture, agencies need to understand both worlds.
We need people who understand science and culture, regulation and creativity, patient behaviour and consumer behaviour, medical evidence and social algorithms.
Our role is increasingly about translating between those worlds. We need to take complex science and make it understandable without making it inaccurate. We need to make healthcare brands culturally relevant without trivialising serious conditions. We also need to create work that performs commercially while recognising the responsibility that comes with potentially influencing someone’s health decisions.
For me, that is a much more exciting challenge than simply producing advertising that ticks all the compliance boxes.
Dubai has an opportunity to set the standard
What makes this development particularly interesting is where it is happening.
The UAE is one of the most digitally connected markets in the world and has developed an incredibly dynamic creator economy. At the same time, we are seeing huge investment and ambition across healthcare, technology, longevity, prevention and personalised medicine. These worlds are naturally coming together.
Dubai’s decision to establish clearer expectations around how healthcare professionals and organisations communicate on social media therefore feels very timely.
I also think it reflects something we increasingly see across the UAE. There is an ambition not simply to react to how industries are changing, but to create frameworks that allow those industries to develop responsibly.
For the advertising industry, this should be welcomed rather than feared. Good regulation does not necessarily sit in opposition to good creativity. In many cases, having clearer boundaries forces us to think harder and ultimately produce better work.
Credibility could become healthcare’s biggest creative advantage
There is also an important commercial consideration.
Consumers today are surrounded by health information. Every day we see content about wellness, supplements, weight loss, longevity, aesthetic treatments, nutrition and increasingly sophisticated health hacks. Some of that information is credible and incredibly useful. Some of it is not.
As the amount of health content continues to grow, I believe credibility will become increasingly valuable.
Healthcare brands and organisations that communicate transparently, responsibly and in a way that respects people’s intelligence have an opportunity to build stronger relationships with their audiences. In that environment, trust itself becomes a competitive advantage.
For agencies, that changes the brief. We still need to make people stop scrolling. We still need great ideas, great storytelling and content that people actually want to engage with. But we also need people to trust what they see once we have their attention.
That is why I see Dubai’s latest move as a positive development for our industry. It should not simply be viewed as another compliance requirement that agencies and healthcare brands need to navigate. It is an opportunity to raise the standard of healthcare communication.
In healthcare, creativity carries a responsibility that few other categories do. We are not only influencing what people buy. Sometimes we are influencing how they understand their bodies, how they think about disease and the decisions they make about their health.
If stronger standards push all of us towards communication that is more credible, more responsible and ultimately more useful to people, while still challenging us to produce brilliant creative work, then I believe that is a very positive direction for healthcare advertising in this region.
By Carlo Nakhle, Business Director, Havas
