03 / ALTERNALEAF

Paid Media Campaigns

Putting care first

Creative Strategy · Creative Concept · Copywriting

The brief

We weren't selling a product. We were selling a clinic.

Alternaleaf operates in a category most people misunderstand, under TGA and AHPRA rules strict enough that we couldn't openly promote the treatment, make health claims, or promise an outcome, and the people on the other end of the ad weren't abstract — they'd often spent years feeling dismissed, quietly looking for a different path to care.

So the job was never just to describe what Alternaleaf offered. It was to build trust, spark curiosity and drive action, through paid media, inside a set of guardrails most brands never have to design around.

The strategy

Traditional product advertising was off the table, so instead of leading with the treatment, we led with something more universal: the experience of trying to find care. The audience wasn't necessarily looking for a specific product, they were looking for help, wanting to feel heard, understand their options, and find a healthcare pathway that actually felt right for them. That became the strategic reframe: when you can't sell the treatment, sell the reason to seek care.

From there, we built the work around one idea — care first. Creative that recognised the human experience without exploiting it. Curious without being vague. Approachable without over claiming. Distinctive enough to compete in paid media without ever leaning on the product itself. Four campaigns then took that strategy in different directions, each one addressing a different barrier standing between Alternaleaf and the people it wanted to reach.

The work

Making Care Simple

Team: Brooke Krumbeck (Copy Direction) & Kimberly Cruz (Art Direction)

The brief was to build high-quality performance creative for caregivers, an emerging adopter persona for Alternaleaf, to help grow brand awareness. The insight that drove the work was rooted in a real tension: caregivers are often pushed into demanding roles just as their own health starts to falter, constantly balancing their own wellbeing against the responsibility of looking after someone else. From that came the central idea — you need to care for yourself before you can care for others.

The campaign brought that tension to life through two real caregiving stories: a single dad balancing parenting, full-time work and his own health, and a daughter who had moved home to help care for her father living with dementia. Rather than positioning care as another responsibility, the creative reframed it as something caregivers could actively prioritise for themselves. The result spoke for itself with brand awareness up 3% and consideration up 4% quarter-on-quarter, tracked through Tracksuit across the period the awareness ads were running.

Finding the human truth.

Alternative Friday

The brief was to make Alternaleaf's services more affordable and accessible for new patients at a time when the cost of living was putting pressure on healthcare decisions and to use a compelling offer to bring more people into the alternative healthcare category who might otherwise feel priced out of care.

The insight was straightforward but important: patients want the best quality of care to help them achieve a better quality of life, even if it only improves things a little. From that came an idea that leaned into what Alternaleaf couldn't do as much as what it could. While other brands joined the big seasonal sales like Black Friday, Alternaleaf offers something more than a discounted product — it offers alternative healthcare.

So rather than joining a sale, the campaign launched Alternaleaf's own annual occasion: a moment that made quality alternative healthcare genuinely affordable and accessible, positioned not as a discount event but as an industry-leading statement. It wasn't just a sale. It was an event. The result was Alternaleaf's highest-performing campaign to date, with the work picked up in a Sydney Morning Herald feature.

#1

Setting a new performance benchmark

Released in 2024, the campaign exceeded targets and outperformed all previous paid media campaigns for Alternaleaf.

Alternative Care Within Reach

The brief was to grow new-patient conversions by more than 18%, targeting Alternaleaf's concession audience directly across four distinct personas: low-income patients, families, pensioners and young males. The insight that shaped the approach was simple but consequential — a single message was never going to land the same way across four groups with very different circumstances, motivations and barriers to care.

Each persona needed to see their own situation reflected back at them, not a generic discount aimed at no one in particular. The idea was a tailored creative suite built persona by persona, rolling out across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Google through statics, video and a dedicated landing page for each audience.

The goal was to make "within reach" feel specific and personal rather than broad and promotional because affordability means something different depending on who you are and what you are managing. The result exceeded expectations, delivering the clinic's highest patient sign-up growth since early 2024, hitting the 18% conversion target and surpassing the broader marketing objectives set for the campaign.

The regulation

The regulation wasn't an obstacle we dealt with at the end; it shaped the creative from the beginning. Working within TGA and AHPRA requirements meant understanding what we could say, what we couldn't, and where the real creative opportunity lived between those two lines. Every word had to work harder: compelling without claims, human without becoming emotive for its own sake, clear without oversimplifying.

As Senior Copywriter, I wasn't simply writing within an established creative direction. I was helping develop the campaigns themselves, shaping the strategic thought, creative concept, messaging and execution alongside Art Directors and Designers.

Why it mattered

Across these paid campaigns, the work gave Alternaleaf different creative ways to build awareness, explain the brand, reach specific audiences and drive action, without relying on the treatment as the advertising idea.

When you can't say everything, you have to know what matters most.