I’ll be honest… when Juliet first showed me around The Gut Clinic, my first thought was “how on earth do we make a video about THIS?”
The Gut Clinic offers colon hydrotherapy. It’s a private, personal treatment that a lot of people are curious about but feel a bit awkward even asking about. And that was exactly why Juliet needed a video. Her clients loved the experience once they were through the door. The hard part was getting new people to feel comfortable enough to book in the first place.
What started as a small, simple video turned into the clinic’s main paid ad on social media for months. It’s safe to say it became one of the biggest drivers of new business for the clinic over the six months after we filmed it. Here’s how it came together.
The brief: make people feel comfortable before they arrive
Juliet runs The Gut Clinic out of the Optimal Health Centre on Gorge Road, a shared wellness space with other practitioners. She didn’t need a flashy ad. She needed something that did the job she does in person every day: make people feel welcome, safe and at ease.
So the real brief was less about showing the treatment and more about answering the questions a nervous first-timer has:
– What does the place actually look like?
– Who’s going to be looking after me?
– Is it private? Is it clean? Will I feel embarrassed?
If the video could answer those in a minute, without anyone having to read a wall of text, it would do its job.
We met at the clinic first so I could walk the space and get a feel for how Juliet works with her clients. Before the shoot I gave her a bit of homework too: send me a few videos from brands she liked the look of, and think about how she wanted the “story” of the video to go.
Should we start outside and walk in? Should she talk to camera, or keep it to a gentle walkthrough with text on screen? Doing that thinking up front made the shoot day so much smoother.
The approach: soft, warm and calm
We agreed early on that the whole thing needed to feel gentle. Not clinical, not salesy, and definitely not “medical drama.” That shaped every decision on the day:
– Light. Soft, warm, natural light wherever we could get it, so the rooms felt calm rather than sterile.
– Movement. Slow, smooth camera moves on a gimbal. Nothing fast or jumpy.
People. Juliet front and centre, smiling, relaxed and welcoming, because she IS the reason people come back.
– Detail. Lots of close, tactile shots of the space, the equipment and the little touches that show how much care goes into the place.
We also shot a full set of brand photos at the same time, so the clinic’s website, social posts and ads would all have the same look and feel as the video.
The hard part: filming a treatment you can’t really show
This is the bit that made the job interesting.
With most clients, the product is the hero. You show it off as much as you can. Here it was the opposite… the actual treatment is private, and showing too much would have put people OFF booking, which is the last thing an ad should do.
So the challenge was telling the story of the experience without showing the treatment itself.
Those rounds of feedback were a big part of why the final video worked. Juliet knows her clients, and she knew exactly where a first-timer might flinch.
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Show the care, not the procedure. We focused on Juliet preparing the room,
the calm space and the reassuring details. Viewers get a feel for the
experience without seeing anything that makes them squirm. - Let the footage do the explaining. Rather than a full voiceover talking through how it works, Juliet spoke softly as she showed you around the space.
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Keep the look soft from start to finish. The tone of the video stayed the same throughout,
using Juliet's voice as the guide. Because of the dynamic lighting in the space, we
intentionally chose to not use additional studio lighting and leave it as authentic as possible.
What I delivered
– One short brand video, focused as a “Welcome to The Gut Clinic” film built for social media.
– 25-30 edited photographs of the clinic, of Juliet interacting with a client and the clinic experience.
– Everything delivered through a private online gallery, with the videos alongside the photos so it was all in one place.
First drafts were with Juliet about 1 week after the shoot, and we worked through her feedback until it was exactly right.
The result: months as the clinic’s main paid ad
The Gut Clinic ran the welcome video as its primary paid advertisement on social media for multiple months. When a business keeps putting real ad budget behind the same piece of content month after month, that tells you it’s working.
Over the six months after the shoot, the video became one of the clinic’s biggest drivers of new business, bringing in people who might otherwise never have taken the step to book.
A lot of ads get pulled after a couple of weeks because they stop performing or people get tired of them. A video that holds up as the lead ad for months is doing something right. In this case I think it’s because it doesn’t feel like an ad at all. It feels like a warm welcome.
