A healthy healthcare strategy is just a Klick away

This post is sponsored by Klick Health APAC.

There’s no denying healthcare is among marketing’s most complex categories. Every campaign must navigate evolving regulations, multiple stakeholders, scientific scrutiny, and diverse audiences across Asia Pacific. Add AI, demands for personalisation, and pressure to do more with less, and the challenge only intensifies.

Conventional wisdom says that complexity slows creativity, but Klick Health APAC is demonstrating the opposite.

Four years after establishing its Singapore headquarters and APAC footprint, the world’s largest and most-awarded independent healthcare agency has grown from a six-person team into a 40-person hub serving clients across 12 APAC markets. Along the way, it has expanded its capabilities, strengthened its healthcare professional and medical communications expertise, and built a model for modern healthcare marketing across APAC.

“Healthcare is no longer a category where generalist thinking is enough,” says Graeme Read, managing director of Klick Health APAC.

“Our clients are navigating increasing scientific complexity, regulatory scrutiny, and cultural diversity across their markets. They need partners who understand those realities. We’ve found that when you build for complexity, better ideas emerge.”

Unlike many agencies that treat healthcare as one practice among many, Klick was built exclusively for health. Strategy, creative, science, regulatory, data, and technology operate as one integrated model, enabling teams to solve problems with healthcare’s unique constraints. Rather than seeing regulation as limiting creativity, it’s part of the agency’s creative brief.

“People often think compliance and creativity are opposing forces,” says Shraddha Tawate, SVP, activation strategy, APAC, Klick Health.

“In reality, healthcare demands a higher level of creative thinking. Every market has different regulations, cultural nuances, and behaviours. The challenge isn’t making one idea work everywhere, it’s creating an idea that’s strong enough to adapt.”

The philosophy was tested in one of Klick’s largest regional initiatives for a leading pharmaceutical company: an HPV and cervical cancer awareness campaign spanning 10 APAC markets. The work required 1,500 localised assets generated from 70 master assets, each tailored to local regulatory requirements.

In a region where approval processes, language, and even permissible terminology vary dramatically between markets, the campaign demonstrated that regulatory rigour and creative ambition can coexist.

By combining localised storytelling with operational efficiency, the campaign reached both healthcare professionals and consumers at scale; an approach Klick has since applied to several other clients across the region.

Making that possible are the unique operating model and cutting-edge tools Klick has built specifically for healthcare communications. Proprietary platforms such as Klick Pharma Flow (enables AI-assisted asset creation) and Klick Guardrail (helps teams anticipate compliance issues before medical-legal-regulatory review), are designed to reduce unnecessary rework while giving creative teams confidence to push ideas further.

The agency has also developed simulated healthcare professional personas to test campaign messaging quicker and more cost-effectively than using traditional market research.

For Read, AI is valuable because it gives his team more time to solve the problems that matter.

“We’re finding that AI is helping us remove friction and spend less time on repetitive processes and more time doing higher-level work such as solving meaningful challenges. It benefits everyone – our people, our clients, and ultimately the patients we all serve.”

That philosophy extends beyond marketing. Through Klick Labs, the company’s innovation group, researchers have developed an AI model capable of detecting Type 2 diabetes from fewer than 10 seconds of voice with over 85% accuracy. With India serving as an early test market, and further research underway in collaboration with a leading Singapore research hospital, the work reflects Klick’s broader ambition to use technology to improve healthcare itself.

As Klick’s Singapore office has expanded, the agency has built a top-notch multidisciplinary team combining strategists, creatives, scientists, and medical communications specialists from across the region.

Its acquisition of Ward6 Singapore last year further strengthened its healthcare professional and medical communications capabilities, while ongoing AI training, leadership development, and knowledge-sharing programmes have helped the agency scale while maintaining a culture of continuous learning.

And those investments have also paid off on the awards circuit. Klick has earned hundreds of prestigious honours in recent years, including three at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s 2026 Agency of the Year Awards in Singapore: Gold for Specialist Agency of the Year; Gold for Agency Team of the Year; and Silver for Agency Leader of the Year for managing director of Klick Graeme Read.

Among its most-awarded campaigns this year was “Infinite Saree”, which transforms India’s most iconic symbol of womanhood into a collective demand for justice. Created for the Red Dot Foundation, the initiative drew attention to the marital rape exception in India’s penal code, which leaves millions of married women without legal protection from sexual violence.

Its captivating focal point was a saree that stretched four kilometres (the world’s longest) and featured a living petition with embroidered signatures calling for change.

For Tawate, however, the agency’s biggest achievement isn’t measured by awards, but human outcomes.

“The future of healthcare marketing won’t belong to agencies that know a little about healthcare,” she says. “It will belong to agencies that understand how science, culture, technology, and creativity work together to improve health outcomes. That’s the future we’re building towards at Klick.”