health care

Smiles Overcome Stress In Village Dental Campaign, As Industry Rebounds

 

 

Stressful situations are overcome with smiles in a campaign designed to get people to de-stress about making dental appointments.

Village Dental, which operates four facilities in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina market, launched the six-month campaign on Monday with three spots from locally based agency The Republik. It’s the dental provider’s largest campaign ever.

“Say goodbye to anxiety with our sedation dentistry,” says a spot taking place in a waiting room at the Department of Motor Vehicles. “When life stands still, smile it away.”

“Protect your smile with a free consultation,” advises another spot in which people gape poolside at a badly sunburned, but smiling (and gap-toothed!), man. “When life gets hot, smile it away.

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A third spot shows a woman coping with mischievous kids in a supermarket aisle: “When life’s a circus, just smile it away.”

Additional creative is promised.

Each spot comes in :05, :10, :15 and :30 versions, and they’re running on cable, OTT and digital.

The Village Dental campaign correlates nicely with new data coming out of nationwide online medical appointment booker Zocdoc about the dental industry’s rebound following the pandemic’s devastating early months, when dental visits fell 75%.

Smiles and stress both figure in Zocdoc figures showing a 10% increase in dental appointments from August 2021 to August 2022.

Smiles? With many mouths “coming out from behind the mask for the first time in years,” Zocdoc found cosmetic procedures on the upswing, with Invisalign appointments up 32% year-over-year, dental implant appointments up 17%, and broken tooth appointments up 16%

Stress? Pandemic-caused stress-related bruxism (grinding or clenching of teeth) is on the rise, Zocdoc, said. It pointed to cracked tooth repair appointments up 43%, TMJ (Temporomandibular joint) pain appointmentsup 33%, general dental pain appointments up 32%, and gum disease/gingivitis/bleeding gum appointments up 22%.

Putting off dental care has likewise led to “serious dental issues for some patients,” Zocdoc noted, with root canal appointments up 20% and wisdom tooth appointments up 17% year-over-year.

The pandemic has also led to a boom in new patient appointments for dentists, Zocdoc reported. Such appointments are up 18% YoY, it said, “with some using the lapse in appointments or a geographic move to find a new provider.”

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