How a community insight changed the messaging of Ria's campaign

When the client came with a request to re-run last year's Ria Ultra campaign, it was clear that simply redeploying the same creative would not be enough. Thanks to our long-term community management, we knew that part of the audience had read the original messaging differently than intended. Instead of the idea that menstruation is no big deal, women heard more of a pressure to talk about their period loudly and in public. That feedback became the starting point for the whole new communication.

The point was not to come up with an entirely new campaign. It was something more complicated: to take existing material and change its message.

We needed to keep the communication consistent and make efficient use of creative that was already finished. At the same time, we had to shift the narrative so it would not feel directive. It should not tell women how to perceive menstruation, but support the idea that everyone can experience it in their own way.

The re-run did not become a mere repeat of last year's campaign, but a deliberate reframing of it. The claim “prostě menstruuju” (“I just have my period”) captured everything we were trying to communicate. There is no single right way to experience menstruation or to talk about it. Some people talk about it openly, some keep it to themselves. Both are fine.

This very change turned the original communication from a one-way message into a more sensitive and more precise narrative. We adjusted all the content that could suggest the brand was pushing the topic in one direction and began communicating it so that women could identify with it.

The client wanted to develop its communication over the long term mainly in digital — through performance campaigns, its own content or a podcast. But we were looking for a way to take the topic further. Not just to broadcast it, but to open it up to people, give them room to enter it with their own experience, and then bring it beyond the screens into public space.

Two creators on Instagram, @zkazena and @_lucerna_, played an important role among them. They opened up the whole Prostě menstruuju theme through their own original work. Through poetry, they helped carry the new idea into a more sensitive and more human dimension.

Instead of yet another one-way communication, we created a landing page where women and girls could share their own experiences of menstruation. Anonymously, or under their own name. The brand thus returned to its natural community role. Real stories no longer stayed only in comments and messages, but gained a visible space of their own.

At the same time, we carried the topic beyond the screens. Several of the statements appeared on CLV displays in Prague and Brno and on other formats in public space — at railway stations, in the metro and at public transport stops. These placements brought people to the landing page and opened the topic up to a wider audience.

We then continuously selected the contributions women shared on the landing page and fed them back into the communication on social media. The campaign was thus not just another broadcast of a finished message, but an open framework that women could enter with their own experience and keep shaping.

The biggest change did not happen only in the messaging, but also in how the brand's long-term listening approach carried over into the campaign itself. Almost forty authentic statements were added to the landing page, and some of them then returned to the content on social media.

The campaign was thus not just another wave of communication. It became a space where women could step into the topic themselves and help shape it with their own experience.

We therefore treated the re-run not as a mechanical repeat of a finished campaign, but as an opportunity to respond to what women were actually telling us. We did not change the character of the brand. We gave its listening, community-driven approach a new, visible format.