Millennial Media Opps: Orangetheory shakes up marketing strategy to reach younger audiences

Orangetheory's CBO, Kevin Keith, recently released details regarding the company's new marketing strategies. It established a new partnership with DJ and producer Steve Aoki; Orangetheory will use this celebrity partnership as a marketing tool. For now, Aoki will work on scoring the track for the next phase of the company's "More Life" campaign. New work is expected to launch later in 2022. Creative, digital, social, programmatic and media AOR Tombras will be behind the new ads.

As its new Chief Music Officer, Aoki will remix songs so that Orangetheory's classes can listen to the company's own music. The hope is reportedly to increase motivation since Orangetheory conducted a survey. 91% of members said music is very important to their workouts, and 94% reported that music motivations them to push harder within the workout. 

Orangetheory has more plans for 2022. For example, it will debut a collection with apparel brand Vuori, which will follow a collaboration with Lululemon. Orangetheory is working to attract people starting to return to gyms post-pandemic.

Per Pathmatics, the gym chain has spent roughly $696.6k on digital ads YTD, more than 5x the roughly $151.6k it spent within the same 2021 timeframe. In 2021, Orangetheory's approximate full-year spend reached $1.3m, down slightly (7%) from that of $1.4m in 2020. So far this year, the company has earned around 93.2m digital impressions via Facebook (29%), Instagram (26%), desktop video (22%), desktop display (16%) and mobile display (7%) ads.

Additionally, Magellan reports Orangetheory has aired 63 podcast ads within the past 12 months.

Sellers - Right now, the company primarily advertises digitally, and it moved much of that to Google properties due to a decline in Facebook performance following Apple's 2021 iOs privacy updates. Additionally, its email newsletters are opened at almost a 50% rate. According to Kantar data, Orangetheory also invests in print (local magazines), radio, OOH and local broadcast. It is also working with other micro-influencers with a few thousand followers who feel like authentic matches. Its membership has started trending younger, with an average age of 39, so it seems its target demographic is doing the same. Around 75% of Orangetheory's members are female. Sellers should contact sooner rather than later to secure some of these increasing digital ad dollars.

Agency & martech readers - I see no major signs of upcoming agency reviews, but you might have a shot at project-based work.