Ryvita Bets on Liberation Over Dieting With Its 'ish' Campaign
Ryvita's 'Live life with a little more ish' is a 2022 integrated film and media campaign, created by Havas London with media handled by the7stars, that returned the brand to United Kingdom television screens after a six-year absence by replacing its longstanding diet-focused positioning with a platform built around versatility, self-kindness, and everyday enjoyment.
The campaign launched in June 2022 and represents Havas London's first above-the-line work for Ryvita, following the agency's appointment in November 2021, as reported by LBBOnline. Its arrival marked a deliberate strategic rupture. Ryvita, owned by Associated British Foods, had long occupied the functional health and weight-management end of the crispbread shelf. The new communications platform abandoned that territory entirely, repositioning the brand as a cultural ally for consumers who want to eat well without self-judgment. The creative idea centres on a single, flexible suffix — 'ish' — that accommodates contradiction, informality, and pleasure simultaneously.
The hero television film features a woman eating Ryvita at different times of day with an eclectic variety of toppings: strawberries and chocolate spread, melted cheese, peanut butter and gherkin, a mix of relishes. A voiceover carries the brand's new manifesto: 'At Ryvita, we are about living well and eating well, with a little room for ish. Because ish never judges how thick you slather. Healthy-ish. More-ish. Wonderfully weird-ish.' The film positions Ryvita Crispbreads, Crackerbread, and Thins not as diet staples but as canvases for whatever a person feels like eating. In the United Kingdom, that tonal shift — from restriction to permission — connects the brand to a broader cultural conversation around balanced living rather than prescribed wellness. The campaign also incorporated a brand redesign, making 2022 the most significant relaunch moment in the brand's recent history. Clapboard scores this campaign 63 out of 100.
Ryvita entered 2022 facing a structural tension familiar to heritage food brands in the United Kingdom. Its equity was built on a health and diet platform that had become culturally limiting. Nikki Wilkinson, Senior Communications and Digital Manager at Ryvita, stated in November 2021, as reported by LBBOnline: 'Our ambition is to build on the category and product growth experienced during the pandemic to create a modern, confident, culturally relevant brand for all occasions and more consumers.' That ambition required Havas London to reframe not just the advertising but the brand's entire relationship with its audience.
The strategic move draws on a well-documented shift in UK consumer attitudes toward food. The concept of 'balance' and self-kindness had been gaining traction as a counter-narrative to restrictive diet culture, particularly among younger adult demographics. By anchoring the campaign in the word 'ish' — a suffix that implies approximation, flexibility, and good humour — Havas London gave the brand a linguistic device that could absorb almost any eating occasion without contradiction. The crispbread category itself sits in a competitive space in the United Kingdom. Ryvita is listed among leading UK savoury-biscuit brands alongside Jacobs, Ritz, Nairn's, Snack a Jacks, Carr's, Kallo, and Tuc, according to Mintel. Jacobs and Ritz, in particular, have historically communicated around taste and sociability rather than health, meaning Ryvita's repositioning brought it into closer competitive proximity with those brands while simultaneously vacating the diet-food territory it had long owned. The crispbread market generated more than €620 million across ten tracked EU countries in 2022, according to Biscuit International, indicating the commercial scale of the category Ryvita was competing in. Media planning by the7stars placed the campaign in precisely the programming environments — Love Island on ITV2, Gogglebox on E4, The Midwich Cuckoos on Sky Max — where younger and broader UK audiences were most concentrated during the summer of 2022.
Havas London built the creative execution around a single domestic protagonist whose eating habits are unapologetically personal. The hero film deploys a naturalistic visual grammar: ordinary kitchen environments, varied times of day, and toppings that range from familiar to deliberately unexpected. The peanut butter and gherkin combination is not an accident — it functions as a visual declaration that the brand will not police what belongs on a crispbread. Every topping choice in the film is a small act of self-permission, and the voiceover reinforces that logic with warmth rather than instruction.
The copywriting is the campaign's most distinctive creative asset. The 'ish' suffix works because it is grammatically elastic — 'healthy-ish', 'more-ish', 'wonderfully weird-ish' — and because it carries cultural familiarity. British English speakers use 'ish' conversationally to soften statements and avoid absolutism, making it an unusually precise cultural fit for a United Kingdom audience. Havas London, under Chief Creative Officer Vicki Maguire, channelled that vernacular register into a brand voice that reads as genuinely native rather than borrowed. The film's tone avoids the aspirational perfection common in food advertising and opts instead for something closer to companionship. Production credits beyond Vicki Maguire's creative leadership are not publicly documented in available sources for this campaign. The integrated campaign extended beyond the hero film, with the brand redesign working in concert with the communications platform to ensure visual and verbal consistency across all touchpoints. The7stars' media strategy amplified that consistency by concentrating placements in high-profile summer programming that guaranteed significant reach across the United Kingdom during the campaign's launch window in June 2022.
No independently verified post-campaign performance data for 'Live life with a little more ish' is publicly available in terms of sales uplift, brand-tracking shifts, or media effectiveness metrics. However, the campaign's structural decisions point to clear effectiveness indicators. A reported budget of approximately £3 million was concentrated into a media plan built around the United Kingdom's highest-reach summer programming, as reported by Campaign. Placement alongside Love Island on ITV2 — one of the most-watched programmes among 16-to-34-year-olds in the United Kingdom during that period — ensured the campaign reached precisely the younger adult cohort that Ryvita's repositioning was designed to engage.
The structural case for effectiveness rests on three pillars. First, the campaign resolved a clear strategic problem: a heritage brand with strong recognition but declining cultural relevance had a new, coherent platform that could sustain long-term communications. Second, the creative idea — centred on a single vernacular word — is genuinely extensible across product lines, seasons, and media formats, which gives the brand durable infrastructure rather than a single execution. Third, the brand redesign running in parallel means the campaign was not an isolated advertising moment but the front face of a broader brand system refresh. No awards for this campaign have been verified at Cannes Lions, the Effies, D&AD, The One Show, the Clios, or the Webby Awards. Clapboard scores 'Live life with a little more ish' 63 out of 100, reflecting competent strategic repositioning and strong tonal clarity, offset by the absence of verifiable performance data and the limited complexity of the media integration.
Ryvita's 'Live life with a little more ish' is a 2022 integrated film and brand campaign created by Havas London. It returned Ryvita to United Kingdom television after six years and repositioned the brand away from diet messaging toward versatility, self-kindness, and everyday enjoyment across its Crispbreads, Crackerbread, and Thins product range.
Havas London created the campaign, with media planning and buying handled by the7stars. Havas London was appointed in November 2021, as reported by LBBOnline, and the 2022 'ish' campaign represented the agency's first above-the-line work for the Ryvita brand in the United Kingdom.
The campaign ran across UK television in summer 2022 alongside Love Island on ITV2, Gogglebox on E4, and The Midwich Cuckoos on Sky Max. Media planning and buying was managed by the7stars, targeting high-reach summer programming to maximise exposure among broader and younger UK audiences.
Ryvita's health and diet positioning had become culturally limiting in the United Kingdom. As stated by Senior Communications and Digital Manager Nikki Wilkinson, reported by LBBOnline in November 2021, the brand's ambition was to become modern, confident, and culturally relevant for more occasions and more consumers, particularly following category growth during the pandemic.
Vicki Maguire served as Chief Creative Officer at Havas London for the 'Live life with a little more ish' campaign. Further production credits for the campaign are not publicly documented in available sources. The campaign launched in June 2022 and marked Havas London's first above-the-line work for Ryvita.
Ryvita's 'Live life with a little more ish' campaign received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong strategic repositioning and tonal clarity in the United Kingdom market, offset by the absence of publicly verified post-campaign performance metrics and limited media integration complexity.
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