On 12 November 2025 Türkiye published a new regulation covering how health services can be promoted — the Sağlık Hizmetlerinde Tanıtım ve Bilgilendirme Faaliyetleri Hakkında Yönetmelik (Official Gazette no. 33075). It took effect the day it was published.
I wanted to know how much had actually changed on the ground, so I went to the Meta Ad Library — which is public, and shows every ad running on Facebook and Instagram — and searched for dental implant ads currently active in Türkiye. There are around 1,800 of them.
I read through the first several dozen. Most of them appear to breach the new rules. Not in subtle ways — in the headline, in the first line of copy.
I have not named any of the clinics below. The point is not to embarrass anyone; these are patterns, and almost every clinic advertising today is running at least one of them. The ads are all public and anyone can find them.
What the regulation actually prohibits
The short version, for domestic promotion:
- Price, discount and campaign announcements are not allowed.
- Patient testimonials and thank-you messages cannot be used promotionally. Comment and like features are supposed to be turned off on promotional social posts.
- Before-and-after images require written consent, must be shot in the same conditions, cannot be filtered or retouched, and must carry a warning that results vary between individuals.
- Guarantee statements are prohibited.
- Superiority claims, comparisons, exaggerated statements and service-volume declarations are prohibited.
- Influencer promotion is not permitted.
- Direct-contact targeting via SMS and WhatsApp is restricted.
Enforcement runs through provincial evaluation commissions, with administrative penalties for facilities, disciplinary process for physicians, and Advertising Board fines for others.
The health tourism exception — and why it rescues fewer ads than clinics think
There is a carve-out. Health tourism providers may run discount and campaign messaging to patients abroad. This is the exception most clinics I speak to believe they are covered by.
It comes with conditions. The promotion has to run on dedicated foreign-language platforms — not in Turkish. Targeting people resident in Türkiye is expressly prohibited. The HealthTürkiye branding is required, and the online addresses and trade names used have to match the licensing documents.
Every ad I looked at was written in Turkish and running in Türkiye. Whatever the clinic intended, an ad in Turkish shown to people in Türkiye is domestic promotion. The exception does not reach it.
Six live ads, and what each one does
1. The discount ad
An İstanbul clinic leading with “limited-time discount”, a per-unit implant price in lira, a per-unit zirconium price, and “65% OFF” set as the headline on the creative.
That is a price announcement, a discount and a campaign — three of the prohibited categories in a single ad. It also puts a phone number in the body copy, which means the clinic cannot tell which ad produced which call. They are paying for calls they cannot attribute.
2. The package-price ad
An İzmir clinic advertising “12 implants + 28 zirconium teeth” at a fixed lira package price, with six-month instalments at the cash price.
Commercially this is the sharpest ad of the six — a concrete offer, a clear price, a payment term, and WhatsApp as the reply channel, which is where this audience actually converses. It is also a price announcement in Turkish aimed at Türkiye.
3. The guarantee ad
A Şişli clinic offering free panoramic X-ray, an “aesthetic smile guarantee”, a fifteen-year guarantee on veneers and a lifetime guarantee on implants, over a list of nine treatments.
Guarantee language is explicitly out. Set the regulation aside for a second, though: a lifetime guarantee on a surgical outcome is a claim no clinician can honour, and the patients most moved by it are the ones most likely to come back angry. It buys cheap leads and expensive arguments.
4. The “best in the city” ad
The same İzmir clinic, in a second ad: “the best dental hospital in İzmir”, “more than 10,000 successful operations”, “15 years of experience”, then a treatment list where each item is written twice — once in Turkish, once in English in brackets. “Hollywood gülümsemesi (hollywood smile)”. “28 zirkonyum kron (28 zirconium crowns)”.
Three problems stacked. “Best in İzmir” is a superiority claim. “More than 10,000 operations” is a service-volume declaration. And the bilingual bracket thing is someone applying SEO keyword habits to ad copy, where it does nothing at all — Meta does not match ads to searches. All it achieves is copy that is twice as long and half as readable, competing for attention in a feed.
5. The patient story ad
A dentist running a first-person account of a named patient’s treatment, built around two quotes from her — that she was glad she had found him, and that she had always trusted him.
This is the one I would expect clinics to be most surprised by, because it does not feel like advertising. It is warm, it is specific, and it is exactly what the regulation means by promotional use of patient testimony.
6. The one that gets it right
One ad in the set is clean. A dentist explaining immediate-loading implants: what the technique is, who is a suitable candidate, that each case is planned individually and assessed on bone structure, general health and surgical suitability. No price. No guarantee. No testimonial. It states that it is for patient and clinician information, and it carries the variability warning the regulation asks for, close to verbatim.
It is the most compliant ad of the six and, to my eye, the most persuasive — it reads like a competent clinician rather than a sale. Its one real weakness is commercial, not legal: it sends people to an Instagram profile with a “send message” objective, and it carries hashtags, which do nothing in a paid ad. Someone convinced by that ad has nowhere obvious to go.
What I would do instead
The instinct when the price lever is taken away is to assume advertising no longer works. That is not what happens. Price-led health ads were always attracting the least loyal patients anyway — people comparing lira figures across six clinics are not choosing on trust, and they are the first to leave.
- Advertise the consultation, not the treatment. An assessment with a named clinician is a legitimate thing to promote and it is what the patient is actually deciding about first.
- Let the clinician explain the procedure. The compliant ad above works because expertise is visible. That is also the hardest thing for a competitor to copy.
- Send people somewhere you control. A landing page, not an Instagram profile. You cannot measure a profile visit, and you cannot follow up with someone who scrolled past.
- Put the tracking in before you spend. Pixel and Conversions API, with a defined conversion event. Most of the clinics above cannot tell you which ad produced which patient.
- Handle before-and-afters properly or not at all. Written consent, same lighting and angle, no filter, the variability warning. Half-doing it is worse than skipping it.
One caveat
I run ad campaigns; I am not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. I have described what the regulation says and what the ads say. If you are running health ads in Türkiye, have your own lawyer or a mali müşavir read the regulation against your specific campaigns — the penalties differ depending on whether you are a facility, a physician or neither.
If you would like me to look at the ads you are running now and tell you which of these you are sitting on, that is what the free audit is. I will tell you if I think ads are not the right move for you.