Creative Within Bounds in Healthcare

TL;DR

Creative Within Bounds is how I approach healthcare campaigns where the claims, source roles, story boundaries, and review path need to be clear before the creative is already locked. I want to know what the brand needs someone to do, what the audience needs to understand, who can credibly carry the message, what the campaign can and cannot say, and what reviewers need to evaluate. The bounds aren’t the enemy, the last-minute scramble is.

The last-minute scramble.

If you work in healthcare, pharma, wellness, or regulated consumer marketing, you already know this cycle.

Your team sells a good idea, everyone gets excited, and the right stakeholders come together to build a campaign that actually feels strong. Concepts have been explored, decks have been made, partners have been briefed, and the final messaging is starting to feel locked.

Then someone says, “Okay, let’s send this through MLR,” which already feels like too much because, well, Veeva. IQVIA. Need I say more?

Of course medical, legal, regulatory, clinical, or brand safety starts asking questions the team should have considered much earlier. What are we actually claiming? Can this person say that? Does the evidence support that language? Are we implying something we can’t prove?

And then the rewrite becomes about getting things through review instead of making sure the final creative still works for the audience, channel, and person carrying the message.

Next thing you know, we’re at happy hour complaining about how we ended up with something technically acceptable but creatively weak.

And everyone acts like reviewers killed the creative.

I hate that because the review team isn’t the problem in this scenario. They’re usually nice people doing their jobs so they can go home. The problem is that the team waited too long to define what the campaign could say, what the story could carry, and who the audience would trust.

I believe the bounds aren’t the enemy, the last-minute scramble is.

When a campaign affects people’s health, rights, care, confidence, money, bodies, routines, or quality of life, the bounds are part of the responsibility. They exist so no person, brand, or team gets to run rampant with claims, stories, incentives, or language that can do harm. The campaign gets better when we respect the bounds that protect people, challenge the ones we can change, and use both to shape the creative before everyone is already too far down the road.

I started thinking about this more deeply after several people told me, in different ways, that I’m good at creative within bounds and I think that is because I approach every project from this lens.

You might think it’s because I love rules… fun fact, I don’t. I just care deeply about creating clear, useful, and responsible campaigns.

Most importantly, and maybe selfishly, I want the work to be GOOD.

I like this work because the stakes are real. The seriousness should make the team more thoughtful, not more boring.

Influence is everywhere. Trust is not.

This matters more now because people are getting health and wellness information from everywhere.

Pew Research Center found that 40% of U.S. adults say they ever get health and wellness information from social media influencers or podcasts. Among the people who get that information, only 10% trust all or most of it, while 65% trust some of it.

That means people are listening but not automatically believing.

So when we use creators, experts, patients, advocates, publishers, community partners, or brand spokespeople, source credibility isn’t a nice-to-have. People want to know who is talking, why they should trust them, what relationship that person has to the brand or issue, and whether the information is clear enough to actually use.

That’s why bounds matter. They help protect the audience from lazy claims, vague language, bad incentives, and stories that are doing way too much.

Strategy starts with the behavior.

Before I care about the line, the creator, the platform, the activation, the campaign name, or the format, I want to know what the brand wants someone to do.

Those are not the same job. A campaign asking someone to trust a claim needs a different source, message, and review path than a campaign asking someone to donate, try a new routine, or walk into a store. That’s why “make it feel authentic” isn’t a brief.

I recently worked on an oral care sprint, and my strategy didn’t start with “let’s get dentists” or “let’s make this feel credible.” That’s too broad. I needed to ask very specific questions to understand whether a hygienist, product claim, or shelf-level proof would actually change how someone saw the product.

I also had to be careful not to assume that credibility in one part of the portfolio automatically transferred to another product or behavior. A person may trust a toothpaste brand and still not understand why a mouthwash belongs in the routine.

That’s how I begin to figure out what has to be true for the message to matter.

The fixed bounds: what we can't negotiate.

Once I know what we’re trying to move, I want to know what can’t move at all.

These are the claims shaped by research, clinical trials, product truth, substantiation, law, safety language, regulatory guidance, disclosures, consent, branded and unbranded rules, and so on.

I see these bounds as useful more than annoying. With this type of marketing, we should want to know what we can and can’t say. Again, it’s about respecting the people on the other side of the message.

It’s also why I don’t treat FTC, FDA, MLR, legal, or regulatory guidance like some random hurdle that gets in the way of the fun part. The FTC updated its Endorsement Guides and related guidance because modern endorsement channels changed how advertisers reach people.

FDA guidance for prescription drugs and medical devices also speaks directly to internet and social media platforms with character space limitations. If a company chooses to present benefit information in those spaces, the guidance explains how risk information should be considered too.

Stop hiding from medical, legal, and regulatory review.

I recently went into a medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) review meeting and asked if we could change our Veeva upload strategy. I had a simple reason behind the ask, and making the change wouldn’t break protocol. It would save everyone an extra step later. The person leading the review process thanked me for suggesting something so easy, and now there’s one less round of review to deal with.

Simple, but someone had to think about it, and someone had to ask.

People act like MLR will chew your head off, but most of the time, they’re already stuck inside these processes too. They’re in those meetings. They know when something is clunky. They also want better ways of working.

It’s our job to think strategically and help them understand the world the campaign has to live in. They may scroll on social, but that doesn’t mean they understand how social-first creative, creators, retail content, live activations, OOH, or community work actually work from a marketing or sales lens.

Creative and review teams should know each other. That is a hill I’m willing to die on.

To be clear, I don’t mean MLR should write the creative or be in every brainstorm, but the work gets better when the people responsible for accuracy and safety have the proper context.

This isn’t just my personal pet peeve. Pharma marketing teams already talk about MLR as a process that can slow work down when it is disconnected from how campaigns are actually built. Industry writing on MLR keeps coming back to collaboration, clearer documentation, proactive disclosures, and fewer late-cycle surprises because the bottleneck is real.

I’ve lived that, and it truly irks me every time.

The secret weapon: translating the idea across rooms.

Over the years, I’ve developed strategies that allow everyone involved in a creative campaign to work as a team, and it starts by doing the research we’re already doing as strategists anyway.

Before I push on anything, I research to understand the world around the campaign. What are people already saying? What are they confused about? What does the channel require? That research helps me see which bounds are doing their job and which bounds might be making the campaign harder to understand or execute.

My job is to separate the language that helps the audience follow the behavior change from language that only matters because the brand is proud of it.

If the review team only sees the idea when it’s almost done, they’re being asked to react instead of helping shape the campaign.

I’d rather bring reviewers in earlier, show them what we respect, explain what we’re seeing in the audience or channel, and ask where there’s room to move.

It also helps if they look forward to seeing us. We’re creative, after all. I try to make it a little fun and break them out of their routine because the relationship matters. People are more useful partners when the only time they hear from you isn’t a rushed approval request.

You may not get everything you want. Sometimes you win inch by inch. But those inches matter. A slightly better phrase, a clearer source role, a more realistic brief, a more human line, or a review path that actually fits the channel can change the final campaign and make the next review cycle a little bit easier.

Shaking the table: the rules we can actually challenge.

Our meetings with MLR help us understand and shape together the bounds that can’t move and what can.

It’s where the work gets more interesting to me because not everything holds the same weight. We’ve already covered what’s fixed, but some bounds are just how the team is used to doing things. Sometimes it’s language legal prefers, but would reconsider if they had other options. Other times it was created for a different format, channel, team, or era of marketing.

Those distinctions matter because they tell us what to respect, what to question, and what we need to explain before anyone is already defensive.

That’s why you’ll never hear me say, “How do we get around review?” I’m not trying to sneak something past anyone. I’m sitting down at the beginning and figuring out what reviewers need to see, what the campaign needs to respect, and where there may be room to make the process or language better.

The work gets better when everyone stops guessing.

Harvard Business Review published work based on a review of 145 empirical studies on constraints, creativity, and innovation. The takeaway is simple: the right amount of constraint can make creative work better but too many constraints suffocate it.

That’s why I care so much. I want the best outcomes for every campaign I work on. I want to know we earned the influence to help a brand move its audience to act or change.

Plus, I don’t like creating bad work. It makes me sad. I like working on really cool campaigns because I like to think I’m a cool girl. I put the same care into my work that I put into a fun outfit, a cute restaurant, or choosing the perfect Brooklyn apartment.

There are so many useful and commercially strong things we can do with healthcare, advocacy, wellness, retail, beauty, and high-consideration brands. We miss a lot of those opportunities because too many teams are scared to challenge the routine, but I’m not. I love this work because it matters, and I think our audience deserves the same amount of taste we’d give to beauty, lifestyle, or entertainment.

This is Creative Within Bounds.

I start with the behavior, then build from there.

That’s how you make creative work that is accurate, human, and actually worth the money being spent on it.

Common questions.