• by Les Luchter , April 3, 2024

“Trace Like a Motherf….r,” shouts a new billboard from Ritual, the subscription D2C marketer of women’s vitamins and supplements, with the missing letters obscured by a pill capsule.

Capsules also block out letters in other out-of-home (OOH) ads proclaim, “We obsess over every ingredient, like a mother.” One ad touts “vitamin D from f*****g Nottingham, UK,” another “Omega-3s from f*****g Saskatoon, Canada.”

A :45 video spot that has its own share of bleeped-out and blocked-out words as a busy working mom explains that “I take my sweet time researching, because if it’s not the best, it doesn’t go in this walking hot bod….That’s why I love Ritual. They spell out where all their ingredients come from and why they’re there.”

Both moms and Ritual have a “traceability” obsession, the company’s chief executive officer and founder Kat Schneider explains to Marketing Daily.

For moms, she says, traceability is the “deep care and attention to detail” that they put into “finding safe and effective products for themselves and their families.”  For Ritual, it means such practices as scouring the globe for the right ingredients, prioritizing clinical studies and scientific research, and pursuing certifications like one from the Clean Label Project.

The “Trace Like a Mother” campaign, breaking  April 2 and running through June, uses not only OOHG and the video, but other creative on Meta, YouTube and connected TV. “We’ll also be leveraging the campaign on podcast, TikTok, influencer, email and on Ritual.com to tell a comprehensive story,” Schneider says.

Created with the Giant Spoon agency, the campaign – designed to reach new households and lift brand awareness -- marks the largest media spend in Ritual’s eight-year-old history. It's also Ritual’s first national campaign, although the OOH is only running in Los Angeles and Dallas.

Schneider calls “Trace Like a Mother” a “rallying cry to our community to embrace their obsession over better health and higher quality ingredients.”

“The supplement industry has exploded to 90,000+ supplements,” she says, leaving consumers “drowning in a sea of misinformation” and “more confused than ever before. It’s up to them to research everything – which often amounts to added emotional stress. This is especially true for moms who are shouldering unequal loads of invisible labor every day.”