Pair of airpods laying on a light orange solid background with illustrated lines and a megaphone in between them

How Orangetheory Fitness used podcasts to grow registration

These days, when you see people exercise, most of them are wearing their headphones or earbuds. Tombras kept this in mind when its client, Orangetheory Fitness, asked them to come up with a media strategy to get customers to try the Orangetheory workout at the start of 2023. According to a January 2023 survey by YouGov Profiles, 29 percent of U.S. adults listen to something while they work out or do sports.1 Tombras Associate Director of Programmatic John Giuggio explains that “since the pandemic, many people now work remotely, and without a daily work commute they need to find additional time in their day to listen to their favourite podcast. Because of this, we find that many people are now listening to podcasts while they work out, which is why we chose to start testing podcast ads. What better way to reach your potential customers than while they sweat!” Targeting Acast podcast inventory specifically on The Trade Desk allowed the agency and the brand to drive greater campaign performance and utilise content-signal reporting to gain strategic insights about the podcasts that the ads were served on.

Orangetheory Fitness offers group workout sessions, specialising in “heart-rate-based interval training.” For its new audio campaign driving awareness and encouraging class bookings, Orangetheory Fitness, its agency (Tombras), and The Trade Desk partnered to create a strategy. They wanted to reach an audience in a “fitness” frame of mind listening to podcasts, living near Orangetheory Fitness locations. They decided to set up a private deal running against Acast podcast inventory and used content-signal reporting to uncover insights about their audience. They further increased relevance using historical first-party data to focus on highly relevant audience segments using Audience Predictor. Finally, campaign success was measured with incremental reach and conversion pixels from The Trade Desk to track cost per acquisition (CPA) for site visits and online bookings.

In the end, Orangetheory Fitness realised its most successful campaign performance and uncovered more insights on the premium Acast podcast inventory.

Cost-per-booking confirmation was 16 percent more efficient for Acast podcasts compared with other podcast inventory.

Content-signal reporting insights:

  • Orangetheory Fitness discovered that its listeners are more likely to enjoy news, history, and comedy genres.
  • Health and wellness genres drove the most efficient site visits and booking confirmations for the brand. On average, cost per site visit was 33 percent lower, and cost per booking confirmation was 59 percent lower when users were listening to health and wellness genre podcasts.
  • The client plans to use these data points to inform future campaign strategies, applying bid factors for podcasts focusing on the health and wellness category.

With content signals from Acast, Orangetheory Fitness received valuable insights on its podcast audience. This helped Orangetheory Fitness to refine its audience targeting strategy to achieve even better podcast campaign performance in the future. As more publishers recognise the value of passing their content signals and providing more data, podcast inventory is only expected to become more premium and valuable.

To learn more about content-signal reporting for podcasts and activate your podcast campaign, reach out to an account manager at The Trade Desk today!

1. Clifton Mark, “Cleaning, Commuting and Cooking: When Do Americans Listen to Podcasts?”, YouGov, February 8, 2023, https://business.yougov.com/content/45191-what-situations-do-americans-listen-podcasts?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2023-02-09