• by Les Luchter , Yesterday

Fed up with so-called “extreme” wellness trends, Bayer’s One a Day multivitamin brand has enlisted rapper/actor Ludacris to show just how “Ludacris” such trends can get.

In “Health Doesn’t Need to Be Ludacris,” a humorous social-first campaign from Interpublic’s McCann New York, one video shows Ludacris wearing a $10,000 red-light mask, “drinking 25 gallons of water a day” and more, all of which are deemed “ludacris.”  “There’s only room for one Ludacris in this world,” intones a voiceover, “and it ain’t gonna be your wellness routine.”

Two other campaign videos had been released by the campaign’s launch on March 27 (see here and here), with several more to come. The campaign will run through at least July.

Paid ads are running on TikTok and Meta platforms, Amazon search and display, and Samsung TV, with the campaign breaking with what the brand tells Marketing Daily was a March Madness “media takeover across numerous high-impact channels.”

Other campaign media include linear TV, connected TV, YouTube, out of home, retail in-store and ecommerce.

“We wanted to have fun while reminding people that supporting your health doesn’t have to be complicated,” Lisa Perez, general manager, nutritionals, Bayer Consumer Health North America, said in a statement. “One A Day has been rooted in nutritional science for more than 80 years.”

One a Day was acquired by Bayer in 1979.

The brand says it expects the campaign to reach “men and women in different lifestages and with different lifestyles,” aged 13-60, “who believe in the benefits of VMS [vitamins, minerals, supplements]….and are actively taking steps to improve their health.” Primary KPIs will include driving cultural relevance and brand salience, and attributingstrength/ownership in multivitamins and VMS.

For Ludacris, the One a Day campaign is hardly the first time he’s played on his name in advertising. In this spot, he’s summoned by a couple expressing frustration at their ludicrous kitchen conditions when they really needed Jake, the State Farm guy.