Years ago I developed a radio campaign for a LASIK practice, and we never once mentioned the surgery. Instead we talked about life before it. Mistaking a shark for a dolphin and splashing the water to get it to come closer. Waving like a long lost friend at a family on the beach who turned out to be total strangers. Grabbing the wrong tube first thing in the morning and brushing your teeth with hemorrhoid cream, because your eyes are not quite in yet. It won awards. Better than the awards, people remembered it, and they called the practice repeating the bits back to us.

The rule that made it work

Here is why that campaign landed, and why I keep coming back to it 27 years into healthcare marketing. We never made the illness the joke. Bad eyesight was not mocked. Nobody’s eye condition was the punchline. The joke was the very human, slightly ridiculous experience of moving through your day when you cannot see well. Get that distinction right and humor stops being a liability. It becomes the thing that finally makes a practice memorable.

The one rule that keeps it safe

Humor works in healthcare, and most practices are too nervous to use it. The rule that keeps it safe is a single line you never cross: you do not joke about the illness, the diagnosis, or the clinical work. You joke about the human, sometimes awkward experience of being a patient. The paper gown. The intake form you have filled out four times. The waiting room magazines from another decade. Attach the humor to the experience, never the condition, and you earn the attention without the backlash.

What the numbers say about funny

This is not a hunch from the field. Oracle’s global study of 12,000 consumers found that 91% of people prefer brands that are funny, yet only about one in five brands actually use humor in their advertising. Even more telling, 95% of business leaders admit they are afraid to try. Stanford’s research found funny ads are about 30% more likely to grab attention and twice as likely to get shared, and Adobe’s 2025 Creative Trends report found 72% of people would choose a humorous brand over a competitor. Read that again. The audience is asking for it, the data rewards it, and almost nobody is brave enough to deliver it. That gap is not a warning. It is your opening.

Why most clinics never try

The hesitation is understandable. Healthcare carries real weight, and no practice wants to look like it is making light of someone’s health. You do not want to offend anyone. So the safe instinct wins, and the ad ends up warm, tasteful, and interchangeable with every other clinic in town. The problem is that interchangeable is expensive. When your marketing could belong to any provider, patients have no reason to remember you specifically. Playing it safe does not lower your risk. It guarantees you get overlooked.

Here is the thing about humor done right. When you use it to connect with people, they become allies, not adversaries. A patient who laughed with you is on your side before they ever walk in the door.

Your best idea is sitting at your front desk

So where did the LASIK spots actually come from? Not from a conference room, and not from a marketing brainstorm. Before I opened this business I spent years treating LASIK patients. I heard the dolphin story and the hemorrhoid story from the people living them, long before I ever wrote an ad. When I moved into marketing, that was the material I brought with me.

Most practice owners do not have a marketer who spent years in the exam room. But you have something just as good. The people who greet your patients all day are sitting on the same stories. Ask them a real question: what is the most awkward, most human part of being a patient in this office? Even better, ask them what their own struggles are. Chances are they have plenty of stories. They will have an answer before you finish the question, and it will beat anything a committee produces.

The bonus is that they will love watching their idea become the campaign. Your employees feel like their voice matters, and you get a campaign that resonates with the people you are trying to reach. Empowered staff and stronger marketing tend to show up together.

So before you approve one more ad that could belong to any practice in the country, ask the harder question. What is the one true, slightly awkward thing about being your patient that has never once shown up in your marketing? Answer that and blending in stops being a worry. If you want help finding it, that is exactly the kind of insight a Strategy Sprint is built to uncover.