Prologue
Beyond just "interested in health" — a media platform that simultaneously reaches the patients and families who are currently making medical purchases, along with the caregivers physically next to them at the point of care. We sat down with CEO Seo Dae-geon of Carenation, Korea's #1 caregiver matching platform, to understand exactly how health and medical marketers can use this caregiving platform as an advertising channel.
Q. What is Carenation?
Carenation is a caregiver matching platform used by more than 700,000 members, holding around 70% market share in the patient-and-family caregiving space — the #1 service nationwide in Korea. We run two apps in parallel: one for patients and their families looking for caregivers, and one for caregivers looking for work.
Q. You're a KAIST engineering PhD — how did you end up running a caregiver matching service?
Looking into the caregiving market, what hit me most was that, despite this being a space where extremely important decisions get made, the criteria are remarkably opaque. Care is expensive, the required caregiver profile varies sharply with the patient's condition, and yet from the family's side it's hard to tell whether the price being paid is fair.
So we decided: if we can predict caregiving costs based on the patient's condition and actual transaction data, this market can be much more transparent. Carenation's in-house research center keeps refining an algorithm that combines patient condition and transaction data to estimate a fair caregiving rate — effectively improving the structure of the market itself. We focus on raising the efficiency and accessibility of medical services through a data-driven healthcare platform; what's most rewarding is solving real problems in clinical settings on a technical foundation and building a patient-centered digital healthcare ecosystem.
Q. Who uses Carenation?
Over 60% of Carenation users are looking for caregivers for patients aged 50+. At the same time, more and more younger patients with specific conditions are using Carenation when they need care. So Carenation is more accurately described as a place where actual medical purchasing happens, not just a silver-target media. It's not a space full of people who are merely interested in health information — it's where patients, families, and caregivers who are currently making medical purchases gather.
Q. Beyond caregiver matching, Carenation also offers various care and healthcare features?
Yes. On top of caregiver matching, we provide hospital escort, household care, postnatal care, and other care services, plus nearby hospital/pharmacy search and medication management — a wide range of care and healthcare features. This isn't just feature expansion; it reflects the actual life context of patients and families. Patients who used a caregiver during a hospital stay can connect to post-discharge needs like hospital escort and household care, all within the app.
Carenation users aren't sitting at the "just browsing health info" stage. They're already caring for a patient and making real decisions about health and medical purchases. That's the biggest difference between Carenation and a general healthcare content platform.
Q. What's distinctive about Carenation users' spending behavior?
There's a clear pattern among customers who book care services through Carenation. If you've never had to hire a caregiver, it's hard to grasp, but realistically, you can find a caregiver with a single phone call to a caregiving agency. Carenation users still go to the trouble of entering the patient's condition into the app. That's because they're not just trying to find a caregiver fast — they want to choose the right caregiver matched to the patient's actual state.
When you map the Carenation user persona, the psychology is: in the buying process, the feeling of having "chosen well" matters more than the price itself.
From a brand standpoint, these users are sometimes misread as "hard to convince." But in practice, when it's clearly explained that the product is genuinely necessary for the patient, they're absolutely willing and able to pay premium prices. They also re-purchase more from brands they've come to trust, write reviews voluntarily, and recommend products to people they know — ultimately lowering marketing costs. Carenation gives no incentive for review writing, and yet most patient and family users voluntarily leave caregiver reviews — over 24,000 reviews and counting.
Q. Does premium spending actually happen?
Yes. On Carenation, professionals with nursing certifications sometimes provide premium care — well beyond a side job. In those cases, 24-hour live-in caregiving can run KRW 300,000+ per day. Carenation is a media where verified purchasing power is concentrated.
Q. From the advertising perspective, we hear there's another distinctive characteristic.
The typical assumption for health and medical products is that the target audience is the patient's family. But using a caregiver service means the family can't always be at the bedside. The caregiver, on the other hand, observes the patient most closely, and has significant influence on purchase decisions.
For example, when caring for a patient who's been bedridden for a long time and is losing muscle mass, it's common to see caregivers recommend protein-focused health supplements. In that context, caregivers are powerful influencers for health and medical brands.
So Carenation places ads in both the patient/family app and the caregiver app, so that brand messages reach the actual point of care.
Q. Why did you adopt AdControl for ad monetization?
We've consistently received health and medical ad inquiries on Carenation. Common categories include silver care products, vaccines, health supplements, and adult diapers. But due to internal resourcing and business priorities, we couldn't respond to every proposal, and we only ran a selective subset of campaigns.
Even so, every campaign that did run kept pulling engineering and ops resources — a real burden. That's when we came across AdControl. Building an ad platform where advertisers can directly operate and manage their own campaigns, with no upfront cost, and dramatically lowering operating load — that was compelling.
Most importantly, the ad business that had been getting deprioritized internally could now start with minimal resources, supported by Adrop's ad-business expertise. That was the biggest reason we decided to go with AdControl.
Q. What direction is Carenation taking as an ad media?
Carenation users are already making medical purchases and need to make important health-related decisions. In that context, Carenation isn't a media where health-curious users gather — it's a space where the health and medical information they need *right now* has to be delivered. So we believe advertising on Carenation should function as a channel that delivers meaningful health and medical information.
Q. If users have high purchase intent for health and medical products, should message strategy be different too?
The most important thing: the moment the user sees the message, they should be able to instantly judge "Is this what I need right now?" Carenation users are already making medical purchases and have to make decisions centered on the patient's condition. Specific, situation-matched information lands much harder than abstract brand messaging.
For products built for a specific disease or condition, name those keywords explicitly in the message. The user needs to connect their current situation to the message immediately.
Informational messages perform especially well on Carenation. Take welfare-equipment products like electric beds or wheelchairs — a message like "you can buy this with government subsidy" lands less as advertising and more as the information patients and families genuinely need. Those messages help users on the fence decide faster.
Nutritional supplements work the same way. Efficacy-focused copy like "high absorption" works less well than condition-anchored need framing: "why protein matters even when eating is difficult." What matters to Carenation users isn't "is this a good product" — it's whether they can immediately understand "is this the right choice for the situation I'm in right now."
Epilogue
This interview made one thing clear: Carenation's essence as a media is that it's not a space where users consume healthcare information — it's a platform where users actually live the moments when treatment, caregiving, and purchasing decisions happen. For marketers working on high-involvement medical and health products, it's time to think beyond targeting only patient families and design strategies that reach the entire point of care — caregivers included — with precision. And to ask again: "What situation is the person in, and in what context will we reach them?" The most realistic answer we found, in this conversation, is on Carenation.
