A customer takes a magnesium supplement for a month and sleeps better. They say so, sincerely, in their own words, on their own account, because it is what happened to them.
If a brand paid for that post, it cannot run.
That is the part health and pharmacy brands find hardest to accept, and it is the single most important thing to understand before briefing a campaign in this category.
The rule
New Zealand's therapeutic and health advertising code has been in force since 1 July 2026. Under it, a person may not claim in an advertisement that a product treated, prevented or cured a condition. Consumer testimonials for prescription medicines are prohibited outright.
Content a brand has paid for is an advertisement. Sincerity is not a defence, and neither is accuracy. A true statement about a real experience is still a therapeutic testimonial if it makes a therapeutic claim.
Why the rule exists
Because a personal account is persuasive in a way that a data table is not, and because one person's experience is not evidence of efficacy. The more genuine the testimonial, the more effectively it substitutes belief for proof, which is exactly the substitution the code is designed to prevent in a category where the downside is somebody's health.
Disagree with it if you like. It is still the rule, and it applies to the brand rather than to the customer.
Where the line falls
The distinction is between describing a product and describing what it did to a condition.
On the wrong side: it cleared my skin, it fixed my sleep, it got rid of my headaches, I have not been sick since, my joints stopped hurting, my child's eczema went.
On the right side: what the routine is, when they take it, what the format is like, whether it is easy to swallow or pleasant to use, why they keep buying it, what it replaced in the cupboard, how the pack works, whether it is easy to find in store.
Not thrilling. Also not nothing, because most of this category is lost at the shelf to a product the shopper simply recognises.
Beauty brands get caught by this too
The same line runs through skincare. A moisturiser is a cosmetic, and a customer can say how their skin looked and felt. A moisturiser that treated somebody's eczema is a therapeutic claim, and that content is rejected before it is licensed.
As beauty moves further into pharmacy-led retail, this catches more brands than it used to. See beauty and personal care for how the brief handles it.
What a compliant campaign is actually for
Three jobs, all worth doing.
Familiarity. Being the product a shopper has already seen someone they trust holding, before they are standing in front of forty options at Chemist Warehouse.
Format and routine. Where it sits in somebody's morning, how it is taken, what it is like to live with. This is genuinely useful information and it is entirely permitted.
Occasion. The reason it is in the bag at all. In a South Africa campaign, Beiersdorf ran Nivea Sun and Elastoplast together through real parents packing school bags, and it produced more than 16.3 million total impressions, reach 37 times the organic benchmark, and 170 verified product purchases. The campaign was built on occasion rather than efficacy, which is the shape a New Zealand health campaign has to take anyway.
How it is enforced in practice
At moderation, before anything is licensed or amplified. Every piece is read against the brief and the code, and content that crosses the line is rejected rather than edited, because editing it would mean putting words in a customer's mouth that they did not say.
The brief matters more here than in any other category. A customer who is told clearly what the product is for, and what they should talk about, tends to talk about it accurately. A vague brief produces content that has to be thrown away.
The question to settle first
Before briefing anything in this category, answer one question: if the campaign cannot say the product works, is it still worth running?
For most health and pharmacy brands the honest answer is yes, because being unknown is costing them sales.
The full category note is on pharmacy and health, and the moderation process is in what we reject, and why.