Ask who touches the account, not who is in the room
Start with the boring question: who runs the account day to day, and how many other accounts is that person carrying? A good answer names one human being and a number — six to ten accounts, not thirty. Then ask what they will refuse to publish for a clinic. An agency that has actually worked in health has the list ready: no cure claims, no price sitting next to a medical outcome, no patient face without written consent, no doctor's name on copy the doctor has not read. If they invent that list in front of you, they have never run a clinic account.
Ask who owns the ad accounts and the Business Manager. The right answer is that you do, under the clinic's own Meta and Google accounts, with the agency added as a partner you can remove on a Friday afternoon without losing a pixel or a single month of campaign history. Get admin access in writing before the first dinar is spent. Then ask what a normal month looks like in numbers. Most clinic retainers in Kuwait land between 250 and 700 KD, and ad spend on top of that should come off your card, not theirs.
Then ask for a clinic they lost. Every agency with real health experience has one: an account restricted on Meta, a campaign that hit a policy wall, a client who left in month four. What you want is the story, not the excuse — what the restriction was, how long the appeal took, what they changed afterwards. Agencies that have never touched a regulated category answer this with a shrug. In Kuwait, ad rejections and account limits on health categories are routine, so an agency that has never seen one has never really advertised a clinic.
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Six answers that should end the meeting
If anyone promises patient numbers — forty bookings a month, guaranteed — end it there. Nobody can promise that, and the people who say it are either guessing or planning to count WhatsApp hellos as bookings. Second: if the first campaign idea on the table is before-and-after photos or patient testimonials, and nobody in the room raises consent or platform policy, they are not thinking about your licence. Before-and-after content is restricted on Meta across most health categories and needs documented patient permission here. The idea is not automatically forbidden. The silence around it is the problem.
Third: an offer to write posts and articles in a doctor's name that the doctor never reviews. That is your physician's professional reputation being ghost-written by a copywriter in a hurry. Fourth: any request for your patient list, appointment data, or an export from the clinic system so they can build a lookalike audience. Patient data does not go into an ad platform, ever. Give them anonymous website traffic, a properly configured pixel, and nothing that identifies a person. Fifth: refusing you admin access to accounts funded by your money. That is not a process, that is a hostage.
Sixth: no experience with health advertising restrictions at all. Ask directly which platform has rejected a health ad for them and what they did about it. If the answer is that nothing has ever been rejected, either they have never advertised a clinic or they do not read their own notifications. A clinic account in Kuwait will meet restrictions on medical claims, weight loss, and cosmetic procedures inside the first month. You want the agency that already knows which words trigger a review, not the one that will learn it on your budget.
The licence is yours, so the last read is yours
Whatever the contract says, the clinic carries the regulatory responsibility for what gets published. Ministry of Health rules on medical advertising, your licence conditions, and physician conduct attach to you and your doctors, not to a marketing vendor. So build the boring approval step and keep it: one named person at the clinic, usually the medical director, reads every ad and every caption before it goes live and signs off in writing. It costs about ten minutes a week. It is the only thing standing between a clever caption and a complaint filed against your licence.
Ask us these same questions. We run clinic accounts in Kuwait and the honest answers are: no, we will not guarantee patient volume; yes, the accounts stay in your name; no, we will not go near your patient records; and yes, we have had health ads rejected, more than once. The one place we do push hard is the part of a clinic that is not regulated the same way — retail. If you sell skincare, supplements, or post-procedure products at reception, put them in an online store in your own name with KNET checkout instead of counting DMs.
One more thing worth saying out loud: sometimes the right answer is no agency at all. If the clinic is under roughly 8,000 KD a month and one receptionist is already missing WhatsApp messages, fixing reply time beats any retainer. Hire nobody for three months, answer every enquiry inside ten minutes, and watch what the same traffic does. If the numbers still stall after that, bring in help, and bring these questions with you. An agency that flinches at them has told you what you needed to know for free.