How healthcare marketing's experience gap created a new agency model for Capsule

The healthcare marketing landscape in India stands at a critical juncture where science meets storytelling, and compliance intersects with creativity. As healthcare players have increased their marketing budgets by up to 7% of their annual revenue in 2025, the industry faces a challenge: bridging the gap between compliance requirements and meaningful patient engagement. This challenge has given birth to a new agency model that merges healthcare expertise with experiential marketing prowess.

As per research, 93% of brands say experiences are more effective than TV for ROI, while 79% of brands plan to increase their experiential marketing budgets, yet healthcare has been slow to adopt these immersive strategies due to regulatory complexities and industry conservatism.

This disconnect has created an opportunity, one that Praful Akali, Founder and Managing Director of Medulla Communications, identified when conceptualising a joint venture with Tribes Communications. The result is Capsule: The Rxperience Agency, a dedicated healthcare experiential agency in India, which aims to address fundamental gaps in how healthcare brands connect with their audiences.

Addressing industry blindspots

The inception of Capsule wasn't born from boardroom presentations or competitive analysis. Instead, it emerged from a recognition of complementary gaps and shared values that both founders discovered during their initial conversations.

For Gour Gupta, Chairman & Managing Director of Tribes Communications, the timing aligned with broader industry observations. He notes that their conversations were triggered by a simple but powerful insight. 

"Healthcare engagement in India needed fresh thinking, compliance-led creativity, and scale. We had both observed how most activations in the healthcare space tend to be generic, where compliance is often treated as a constraint rather than an enabler, and true patient- or doctor-centric experiences are rare."

This gap led the two parties to realise that they could support each other. 

Praful Akali recalls, "Tribes had been deeply experienced in experiential marketing, but when working with healthcare clients, we realised they needed much more than just experiential capability. On the other hand, having worked in healthcare for so long, we saw how critical activations, events, merchandising, and experiences are in pharma and consumer healthcare marketing."

What began as a strategic assessment quickly evolved into something deeper. Akali explains how the conversation shifted to realisations about shared networks, legacies, and values. 

Gupta reflects, "We are moving into a world that is becoming increasingly specialised, and healthcare events and activations are no exception. They are inherently complex, and not everyone can handle the regulatory, scientific, and experiential demands they carry."

The joint venture combines Tribes Communications' operational scale with Medulla Communications' healthcare specialisation. Tribes contributes a US$100+ million billing infrastructure, 450+ active clients, and 17 offices across India, providing extensive out-of-home and experiential marketing capabilities. The agency's digital out-of-home advertising platforms and experiential technology systems form part of Capsule's technological foundation. 

On the other hand, Medulla brings medical and scientific expertise through a team that includes practising doctors and pharmacists, ensuring regulatory compliance and clinical accuracy in healthcare communications. The agency's proprietary technology platforms for medical communications and patient engagement complement Tribes' experiential capabilities. 

The traditional healthcare marketing ecosystem in India operates through a fragmented approach where clients juggle multiple partners for different aspects of their campaigns. This fragmentation creates inefficiencies and dilutes impact, exactly the problem Capsule aims to solve through what Akali calls the "super-specialist agency" model.

The super-specialist model

Akali shares that there was a time when being a healthcare agency meant being a specialist, and clients preferred that over working with a mainline agency. 

17 years ago, he founded Medulla because healthcare agencies weren't truly grasping advertising, while advertising agencies didn't fully understand healthcare. 

"Healthcare clients are already investing time, energy, and money in events, activations, experiences, merchandising, and outdoor. However, they're often working with multiple partners or handling a lot in-house," Akali explains. "This leads to two issues: the impact isn't as strong as they'd like, and investments aren't optimised."

Compliance represents the most critical differentiator in healthcare marketing. India's Uniform Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing and Promotion creates specific requirements that most experiential agencies don't understand. The UCPMP 2024 in India regulates drug promotion, medical representative conduct, and industry interactions with practitioners, enforced through self-declarations and oversight committees.

Whenever the audience is a healthcare professional or doctor, there is a uniform code of pharmaceutical marketing and promotion in place. This means events must educate and enable doctors to practice within their therapeutic category, not simply incentivise them. 

“Most general event agencies don't understand how to set up compliant content, manage budgets per doctor, ensure pre-signed agreements, or handle transparent honorariums for speakers," as per Akali.

That’s where Capsule aims to step in. Instead of clients working with five different partners, for compliance, content, branding, event execution, or bringing in key opinion leaders from abroad, they can now turn to one super-specialist healthcare event agency that manages everything end-to-end. 

Gupta positions this specialisation within broader market dynamics, emphasising the unique value proposition. 

"Capsule is created to deliver compliant, meaningful, and impactful events and activations. Healthcare has often relied on generic event formats that risk compliance issues, dilute storytelling, and reduce impact."

Both parties have established Capsule as an equal partnership. 

While Akali states that they have “clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and processes to ensure that the best of both companies comes together”, Gupta notes that the structure is designed to “bring out the best in each other and these strengths complement one another seamlessly, ensuring Capsule delivers far more than either could alone.”

Future-proofing through people and technology integration

However, the success of Capsule depends on integrating human expertise with technological innovation, recognising that healthcare marketing's future lies at the intersection of personal relationships and digital capabilities. This involves future-proofing their capabilities.

The convergence of artificial intelligence and healthcare marketing represents a paradigm shift that Capsule aims to leverage. Rather than viewing AI as a threat or simple efficiency tool, both founders see it as a storytelling enabler that can transform how healthcare brands connect with their audiences.

"What sets us apart is how we view AI," Akali explains. "Many agencies see AI as competition or simply as a tool for efficiency. At Medulla, and now at Capsule, we see AI as an enabler of storytelling. Films that once required shoots costing crores can now be created with the same impact through creative intent amplified by AI. This allows us to shift investments from pure production into stronger ideas and narratives."

India's healthcare sector is set to reach $650 billion by 2025, and AI is expected to add $30 billion to the GDP.

The creative aspect of healthcare marketing requires an equally specialised approach. Doctors are ultimately treating patients, and while medical data is important, “communication that resonates often comes from patient-centric storytelling,” Akali notes, and a super specialist agency like Capsule aims to solve this marketing gap. 

The application extends beyond content creation into relationship enhancement. Medulla has pioneered using AI to strengthen the doctor-patient relationship through innovations like voice cloning. For instance, cloning a doctor's voice to reach their patients directly, reinforcing trust and continuity in care. 

Reports note that personalised healthcare campaigns can deliver 5-8x more ROI and boost quality metrics by up to 25%. The agency aims to utilise technology for storytelling and personalisation.

The global expansion strategy leverages this technological foundation. Medulla's recent launch in Singapore, announced in August 2025, represents the first time an agency from the East is expanding further East. "Capsule, therefore, is being built from the start with global ambitions, designed to represent India as a leading healthcare advertising and experiential agency across both regions," Akali states.

Gupta reinforces, "Capsule is built on a deep understanding of the Indian market and the nuances of healthcare in this country—something that truly sets us apart from global networks. At the same time, our approach is global in design, combining the highest standards of compliance, creativity, and innovation."

The venture's structure reflects this balanced approach. As an equal partnership between Tribes and Medulla, Capsule combines Tribes' scale and executional excellence with Medulla's scientific depth and healthcare expertise. The operational integration focuses on what they term "Experiences Rx"—experiences that honour the sacred relationship between doctors and patients.

The 'Rx' stands for prescriptions and recommendations, symbolising the sacred relationship between doctors and patients. The revenue projections, while undisclosed in specific terms, reflect ambitious growth expectations. 

Akali hints that the agency will scale operations to match where clients are actually investing. They are confident that their growth trajectory will be “unlike anything the industry has seen before,” given that they are not borrowing from the mainline agency model, but rather building a new model tailored to healthcare clients and their evolving priorities.

Given that fewer than 10% of healthcare clients in India currently engage with communication agencies, while nearly all invest in experiential and activation-led marketing, this new model addresses a fundamental shift in healthcare marketing investment patterns. With meetings, events, and activations representing the industry's single largest marketing expense, Capsule positions itself at the intersection of where healthcare brands are actually allocating their budgets rather than where traditional agencies operate.