Healthcare and wellness is one of the world’s fastest-growing marketing verticals. Global campaign spend in these categories grew from $25 to $27 billion in the past year, and is projected to nearly double by 2032. With this level of investment, the pressure to make every creative dollar count is high for healthcare marketing and insights teams.
The challenge for these teams is understanding whether their campaigns actually persuade their audiences: are they pushing audiences to favor or consider buying their products? Healthcare and wellness brands operate in a complex environment—one where messaging must build trust, navigate regulatory constraints, and cut through a crowded media landscape. It’s why teams need a rigorous method to test their creative before campaigns go live versus guessing what will move consumers.
To get a sense of what creative themes impact consumer perception in the healthcare and wellness space, Swayable conducted a metastudy analyzing more than 320+ ads tested on the platform over the past two years among 530,000+ consumers. The AI-powered metastudy extracted creative test insights to measure real impact on consumers who participated in Swayable’s randomized controlled trial (RCT) experiments, aggregating ad impact on brand lift, favorability, and purchase consideration.
During a recent webinar, Swayable’s Tyler Montague, VP of Accounts, and Dena Brody, Director of Strategic Partnerships, examined patterns across how healthcare benefits are communicated, the impact of doctors versus patients delivering a message, and the types of emotions that drive brand lift.
If you missed it, watch our webinar below for a comprehensive breakdown of healthcare trends and metastudy insights:
Keep scrolling for our our key takeaways for healthcare and wellness marketers.
Across the ads we analyzed, communicating a specific, meaningful benefit—such as reducing cholesterol or supporting detoxification—generated higher relative persuasion compared to ads that communicated vague benefits (e.g., "be a better version of yourself") or sweeping messages without any benefits at all.
For example, a kombucha brand illustrated this pattern directly. When the brand tested multiple videos with Swayable about how to enjoy the probiotic beverage in a variety of situations—such as pairing the drink with nachos—the ad anchored in a concrete detoxification claim drove 2X the lift in brand attitude compared to versions with more generic gut health messaging.
Doctors and healthcare professional testimonials are a staple of health and wellness advertising—and the data confirms they remain a reliable driver of lift.
A metastudy snapshot of how doctor testimonials perform versus patient testimonials.
Across the metastudy, ads featuring a doctor or healthcare professional generated higher relative persuasion versus ads with patient or consumer testimonials. An important nuance was that doctor-led ads tended to perform more consistently, while patient testimonials showed wider dispersion in terms of their impact across lift metrics.
Recently, a toothpaste brand used Swayable to test how eight influencer videos would impact brand favorability. These videos included dentists and beauty influencers using the product—and test insights revealed that the dentist-led creative outperformed across nearly every metric, delivering a 3X increase in favorability and the highest lifts in purchase intent and brand statements.
“Doctors have built-in credibility. It is a time-tested approach within the health and wellness space, but it does work,” said Montague. “Consumer testimonials also work, whether they're influencers or patients, but there's more variability there. Their performance is more reliant on context—making sure it's clear within the content who they are, why they're relevant, and why the viewer should listen to them.”
Leaning into certain emotions can make or break an ad’s performance. In the healthcare space, depicting negative emotions—such as fear, discomfort, or health consequences—can actually pay off for brands.
While it might be an instinct to explore more positive or motivational creative themes, negative-emotion ads on average performed better than positive or neutral-emotion ads. When analyzing the specifics of these ads, our team found that they didn’t use pure scare tactics—they introduced tension with a degree of humor or lightness, making the approach feel brand-appropriate.
For example, a prescription delivery platform tested two tension-driven video ads depicting urgent health scenarios—an infected tattoo at a music festival and a UTI on a plane. Both ads drove increases in purchase consideration, with the tattoo-focused ad outperforming by 12%, giving the brand confidence to invest further in tension-led creative.
"There are all sorts of questions that marketing and insights teams have within the health and wellness space about their own particular brand,” said Montague. “Creative testing can remove the guesswork. A rigorous RCT approach can really help answer some of these questions, whether you're looking at your own brand's testing history or at macro trends across the broader category."
Interested in pre-testing your healthcare and wellness content? Book a demo with Swayable today.