Healthcare brand Yakult is aiming to get Europe singing about the power of friendly gut bacteria, with an ad campaign featuring a remix of the relatively early internet meme, Numa Numa. My Yakult, the brand’s first TV ad campaign since 2021, is designed to capture the attention of the target audience of 25-50 year olds, by embracing the meme song, with reworked lyrics to include the line ‘my Yakult, my Yakult, my Yakult, friendly bacteria’.
Put together by Brothers & Sisters, the multi-channel campaign launched on Monday 4 September and includes broadcast, social, OOH, and radio.
Numa Numa was a dance video released by American vlogger Gary Brolsma, in which he lip-synced to the 2004 song Dragostea DinTei by Moldovan band O-Zone. It became an iconic trend popular with millennials and has been used in cultural moments for almost 20 years now.
Matt Charlton, CEO of Brothers and Sisters, said: ‘We know traditional advertising is mostly ignored so creating top of mind awareness and attention is paramount to success. Numa Numa has already got a place in people’s hearts — or at least their heads — and algorithms love it, so to borrow that for the purposes of getting adults thinking about their gut health has the foundations of a memorable, unignorable ad campaign.’
Theo van Uffelen, European Marketing Manager at Yakult, said: ‘The public’s awareness of the importance of good gut health is growing, so it’s a crucial time to raise Yakult’s profile among our target audience. Embracing a social media trend in this way is a fun new direction for us, we’re really excited about it. Can we get the countries across Europe singing about gut bacteria and move the subject from the world of science into pop culture with the help of Numa Numa? We hope so!’