Your Agency Wrote It. Your Name Is On the Notice.
Who actually carries a clinic's advertising when a contractor wrote it — in Australia and in New Zealand. The answer is not what most operators assume, and in one of those countries it is close to the opposite.
Most clinic owners have not read their own website in about two years. They approved a draft once, the agency shipped it, and it has been quietly selling ever since. Somewhere on it is a sentence they did not write, cannot remember approving, and would not defend if asked to.
That sentence is the one that matters, because when a regulator looks at a clinic's advertising, it does not ask who typed it.
The assumption almost everyone makes
The reasoning feels sound. You are not a copywriter. You hired professionals precisely because they know this better than you do. You paid them. They wrote it. If it is wrong, that is on them — that is what you were buying.
It is a completely reasonable assumption and it is wrong in both countries, for two different reasons. Australia is the blunter of the two.
Australia — hiring the agency is part of what makes you the advertiser
Ahpra publishes Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service. They define the advertiser, and the definition does the work:
“The person or entity who controls part or all of the advertising (i.e. who authorises the content) is the advertiser. An advertiser has control of the advertising if: they publish or authorise content or direct someone to publish or draft content (including a third party, staff member or marketing agency)…”
Read that twice. Directing someone else to draft your content is not a way out of being the advertiser. It is listed as one of the things that makes you the advertiser. The next sentence closes the door:
“Advertisers are responsible for their advertising, so they need to check any content produced by others on their behalf.”
And on a clinic's own website specifically, the guidelines do not leave it to inference:
“The clinic business owner or practitioner (that is, whoever has control over the website) is responsible for compliance.”
The guidelines note that a court or tribunal may consider them when hearing advertising offences against section 133 of the National Law. And the obligation is not limited to registered practitioners — the guidelines state that anyone advertising a regulated health service must comply, including individuals who are not registered and body corporates.
Source: Ahpra, Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service. Quotations verified against the published guidelines on 11 August 2026.
New Zealand — the agency is caught too, and it changes nothing for you
New Zealand takes a different route and arrives somewhere more uncomfortable. Section 57(1) of the Medicines Act 1981 reads:
“No person shall publish or cause to be published, either on that person’s own account or as the agent or employee of the person seeking to promote the sale, any medical advertisement that—”
So the agency is not outside the provision. “As the agent… of the person seeking to promote the sale” reaches them directly, and section 58 is broader again — it catches a person who publishes, or causes or permits to be published.
Which sounds, for a moment, like good news for the clinic. It is not. The words reach both of you. Only one of you holds the registration, signed the lease, and answers the phone when someone asks who is responsible.
Shared exposure is not halved exposure. It is the same exposure, arriving at two addresses, and only one of those addresses is your business.
Source: Medicines Act 1981 (NZ), ss 57(1) and 58(1). Quotations taken from the current version on the New Zealand Legislation website, 11 August 2026.
“Liability may be shared. Consequence isn't. The agency's exposure is a line item. Yours is the business.”
Why the page explaining this is so hard to find
Search for a plain answer to any of this and you will find regulator guidance, law firm articles pitched at other lawyers, and very little written for the person who actually has to act on it. There is a structural reason for that, and it is worth understanding because it explains the whole information gap.
The New Zealand Act defines an advertisement as words “used or appearing to be used to promote the sale of medicines or medical devices or the use of any method of treatment”. The restriction turns on purpose, not vocabulary. A clinic's services page naming a prescription medicine is promoting the sale of something that clinic sells. An article naming the same medicine in the course of explaining what the rules require is not doing that at all.
The consequence is a strange market. The operators who most need this explained plainly are the operators least able to publish the explanation — because the moment they write it on their own site, in among the treatments they sell, its purpose changes. So the guidance that exists is written by regulators for compliance officers, and by lawyers for other lawyers, and almost nobody writes it for the owner.
Two different problems that look identical from the outside
When a clinic finds a problem in its own advertising, it is almost always one of two things, and telling them apart decides everything about the fix.
Execution problems live in the words. A claim that overstates. A testimonial that should not be there. A medicine named without what has to sit alongside it. Somebody wrote a sentence that should have been written differently, and rewriting the sentence genuinely fixes it.
Foundation problems live in the arrangement. Who administers, under whose authority, on what documented basis. Whether the person injecting on Thursdays is operating under a prescriber who has actually seen the patient. Whether the contractor model that looked like flexibility has quietly parked an obligation on one person who never priced it.
From outside, both show up as words on a page. That is the trap. A rewrite makes an execution problem disappear and makes a foundation problem invisible — the sentence goes away, the arrangement underneath it does not, and the clinic now believes it has dealt with something it has only stopped mentioning.
“You can't market your way out of a business problem. Rewriting the page is not the same as fixing what the page was describing.”
What a careful operator does about it
Read your own site as a stranger. Not the homepage — the treatment pages, the booking flow, the about page where staff are described, the footer that has not been touched since launch. Most of what causes trouble is not on the page anyone looks at.
Find out who actually controls each surface. Your site, your Google Business Profile, your ads, the booking platform, the social accounts an ex-employee still has the password to. Control is the test that decides who the advertiser is, and most owners have never mapped it.
Put review in the contract, not in good intentions. If someone drafts on your behalf, the obligation to check what they produced is yours in Australia by definition. That is a process, and it either exists or it does not.
Separate the two problems before you pay anyone to fix either. A copywriter cannot resolve a question about authority to prescribe. An operating-model conversation will not rewrite your treatment page. Buying the wrong one is how clinics spend money and stay exposed.
If you want to see what your own public pages currently say, there is a free automated check for Australian clinics that reads your site against published regulator guidance and shows you the areas worth reviewing. It returns indicators, not verdicts — and it separates the findings a rewrite can move from the ones it cannot.
Run the clinic advertising check →This article describes what published regulator guidance and primary legislation say, and names the regulators involved. It is not legal advice, it does not assess any particular business's position, and it is not a substitute for advice from a qualified lawyer. Quotations were verified against their primary sources on 11 August 2026; legislation and guidance change, and the version in force when you read this may differ.