How Ladder became Apple's favorite app and made Hilary Duff the face of fitness

0:00There's still arbitrage there. Hillary was having this massive moment in culture, every millennial thinking about getting older and like start strengthening the right place at the right time. Self-awareness is the number one attribute of a great marketer. How is your brain being perceived? What are the conversations around your brand? You can't address them if you don't know. They released a literal knockoff screen for screen, just ladder. We created a campaign ripping off Macris PC, one of the most beloved campaigns of all time. Most marketing misses the mark because they thought it was clever, and they didn't really think about what's the actual conversation that's happening around the product.

0:36Momentum is found too late for legacy brands. To be at that inflection point, you have to be able to take a little bit of risk on it. Data back, but you also have to be willing to take that swing.

0:48Philip Edsel:I'm Eric Fulweiler and this is Scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains, rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today. Hey everyone, my guest today is Philip Edsel. He is the VP of brand and creative and all things marketing at Ladder, which is the world's leading strength training app. They have been on an absolute tear. We've been trying to get them on the podcast for a while and this conversation does not disappoint. Philip has a really interesting and diverse background that he gets into a little bit. Didn't come from kind of like, you know, traditional agency or traditional marketing, but I think that's actually contributed to his effective and kind of challenger approach.

1:32Philip Edsel:But Ladder has been incredibly successful in the time that he's been there. And he talks a lot about how he built out the kind of early marketing engine and found a lot of arbitrage in different places, did a lot of experimentation, but I love just kind of like the scrappiness and the creativity with how he built the first stage of the marketing engine. And then we also talk about kind of the next stage in the marketing engine. They just did this really massive and very successful campaign with Hilary Duff as kind of a celebrity influencer partner endorser, which of course is not a typical thing of a challenger brand.

2:07Philip Edsel:And I loved hearing about just the stories from the inside of the business, sitting down with the CEO and the president to make the call on whether or not that they should do this. And there's actually a very actionable takeaway that comes out of this that I think can be really interesting for people around this idea of momentum and how momentum creates arbitrage opportunity. And then the red thread that runs throughout this conversation, which is one I'm particularly passionate about, is why most marketing is bad. And so Philip shares his views on that and also what he has learned and what he has put into place at Ladder to make sure that that is not happening for them.

2:40Philip Edsel:So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Philip Edsel of Ladder. Philip, thanks so much for joining the show. How are things in Austin today? Pretty, pretty dreary, to be honest, but otherwise, all good. We're, we've got a bunch of construction going on in the office, we're building a new gym. So that's fun. But you may to hear you know the odd hammering or drilling every now and then so exciting and i know um there's some world cup games being played in dallas i don't know if there are any in austin but are you guys doing anything with the world cup going on we no we aren't this year um it's funny like you know when you start to look into you know assets that are available for you know out of home or whatever whatever sort of marketing channels you're looking at um it's crazy how how brands swoop in and take over all the available assets for the World Cup.

3:29But we're not really doing much. We're just watching. Cool.

3:33Philip Edsel:All right. So actually, before we even get to the icebreaker question, in your bio, there's a line I just have to ask you. So you were featured by Instagram for writing the first ever Instagram novel. What was that? Yeah. Novel is a bit of a loose term. every every year in november there's a thing called nano remo national novel writing month um we tried it i don't know maybe uh probably eight ten years ago now uh and it it is insanely hard shout out to anyone that that you know finishes that um the exercise but one year it was like early instagram days back when they used to do community features and stuff back when they used to have community team um but i i i did a 30-day project where every single day I did a photo project with a, with like an actual, um, you know, actress or, you know, had like an actual character and was kind of following her and her story.

4:26And then like sort of wrote these long caption. And it was like basically 30 chapters of this sort of photo novel. I had started this community called, uh, captions by writers, um, back in the day, uh, when I was early to Instagram and early to photography. Um, and so that was just kind of like the project that, uh, that kind of was the result of that. And, uh, yeah, Instagram, Instagram featured it. So I, I, I'm trying to get back into writing these days, but, um, haven't been doing a ton of it lately.

4:54Philip Edsel:Well, I know you got a very diverse background. You got the writing, you got the photography, you got the music background, and it seems like that has contributed to kind of the, you know, um, differentiated approach that you've taken to what you've done at ladder, which I'm excited to get into. Um, but before we do that, the icebreaker question we ask every guest what is one challenger brand that you're particularly passionate about right now and why one is one is tough um i'll say it's funny it doesn't feel like a challenge of the brain i was actually looking at y 'all's uh like top list earlier um and so many of those brands on there you know it's like these are all considered challenger brands i guess like i for me skims i i naturally lean towards like brands with really strong art direction um skims bandit um nothing uh i'm a big fan of their art direction and sort of their creative but to me skims just does such an incredible job of not only their creative and art direction but hitting culture like the exact right moment with the exact right talent and whoever they're featuring whether it's around the olympics or you know they're featuring you have an actress from some show that's like going viral or whatever they're just always on top of it on top of the pulse um probably helps when you have you know kim kardashian uh able to to pick up the phone but um yeah but kind of what they were doing i'm always so curious about this and sorry to go off script so early but um i'm i'm sure you have perspective on this given your background and also you know i'd say ladder is a brand that's done that really well kind of like understood culture around the category of what you're doing and has been able to tap into that and speak to that, et cetera.

6:29Philip Edsel:You know, culture and being able to understand like what's cool, what's relevant is not something you can bottle up, right? It's not like you can get a report from somebody and like know what to do. It's not like you can look at a set of numbers, right? Like those can help inform, but it is a taste thing and a talent thing at the end of the day. What is your, you know, and for me, it's always been either you have the person or the people that get it or you don't. Do you have any advice for marketers that, you know, want to make their brands more culturally relevant, but maybe feel like they don't have the people that have that pulse on culture in the way that they need to?

7:07Philip Edsel:Is it just they got to go find that person or is there anything else that you can do to better understand the culture around your audience and to be able to come up with kind of these more relevant ideas and campaigns? Yeah, I think it's really tough if you're not that person or if you don't have those people on your team that are, you know, and it depends on sort of like what which part of culture. they're tapping into, you know, culture and algorithms are so fragmented these days that it's like not everyone's seeing the same thing at the same time. But, you know, our social person is really plugged into what's happening on on, you know, the algorithms and trending on social.

7:42You know, I generally do a pretty decent job of just sort of saying top line of like, what are people talking about in culture? Like every Monday morning, I have a time block on my calendar, which like a lot of times I skip. But sometimes like it's just sort of a reminder to be thinking about like what are people talking about right now like what's what's top of mind for people and by the time most people think of it most marketers think of it like on their own without actually you know putting their head into it it's probably too late yeah they're they're late to the to the trend which is why you see a lot of cringe marketing that's like hitting the sort of tail end of that bell curve um and so yeah it's just something i think you have to like be um be a participant in.

8:22I mean, there are obviously resources. I'll give an early shout out to one of them. There's a newsletter called After School that I like am obsessed with just because I find it fascinating. Casey Lewis is the journalist there. And all she does is like basically just watch TikTok trends. Like what are the middle schoolers talking about? And like when, you know, it's back to school season, like what are the high schoolers wearing? Like, well, you know, what was the gift haul from Christmas for, you know, 13 to 14 year olds or whatever. So I just find that like that's fascinating um not always relevant to what i'm doing but at least like it helps me at least you know sort of stay in line with with what's happening well i am definitely

9:01Philip Edsel:going to be signing up for that and i think that is a big part of it right like i always think about what gets prioritized gets done and what goes on your calendar gets prioritized right so yeah like it might sound too simple but like you know put on your calendar put 30 minutes every week where like your focus and your priority is just to try to immerse yourself in the culture of the audience. I will, um, I'll put something else out there. And I, I think, well, if people listen to the episode, they've definitely heard this, but I might've repeated it since then, cause it's really stuck in my mind.

9:31Philip Edsel:Another great Austin challenger brand Yeti, we had the CMO on the podcast and, um, they actually structure their marketing team around communities and cultures that they you know want to sell to and they want to be relevant within so they have like a head of hunting and a head of fishing and a head of like you know yeah they've organized their team around culture which i thought was a really cool thing that i think doesn't get talked about enough yeah absolutely i think um just thinking about ladder like i couldn't imagine trying to be you know sort of head of marketing or even on the marketing team for ladder if uh i wasn't like a white hot user myself uh if i didn't like show up every day and use the app and like you know um actually like a fan of the product um just because like you don't know what's happening with the culture if you're not like involved in it so yeah 100 you gotta eat your own dog food something everybody at ravel has heard me say a lot um all right so let's talk about ladder let's get into it so for those who might not know can you give us an overview of ladder what it does sure you're at etc yeah so ladder is a strength training app um it gives you a weekly plan from an expert coach so if you think about uh the sort of landscape of fitness apps everyone knows some version of a fitness app probably you know a peloton or the like um pretty much every fitness app is the same in that they're all sort of content libraries of like on-demand videos so essentially like glorified wrapped youtubes um of like okay today i'm going to go on i'm going to search 45 minute hidden hills ride or like an upper body workout or whatever I feel like doing today.

11:14Um, we built ladder from like an entirely first principles, um, sort of different mindset, which is really like personal training. Um, and the problem that we solve is not necessarily like, um, people that need, need workouts or like need the motivation to get to the gym. Like, I don't know if you guys have seen YouTube, but there are millions of free workouts on YouTube. It's not like people don't have access to workouts. The problem that we solve is that most people don't want to think about what to do in the gym. They just want to be told, like, here's the plan. And they also want to be able to trust that it's from an expert.

11:46So on ladder, you sign up for a team based on your preferred training style, whether that's Pilates and strength or bodybuilding or kettlebells or, you know, whatever it might be. And you have a coach and your coach programs the week of workouts for you every single week. So on Sunday night, your six days of workouts drops and you get to sort of decide when you're going to do it, in what order, how many workouts you're going to do. You kind of make the plan your own, but you at least know that every time you show up at the gym or at home, somebody is going to have the plan written out for you.

12:19And so it just solves that brain damage, which if you think about it, most pretty much every single fitness app, they're not solving that problem. like if you go on their websites, it's hilarious. It's like, we have thousands of different workouts or hundreds of different trainers. And like, that's their main, you know, sort of like key benefit, but that's not, that's not like solving anyone's problems. Like I don't need a thousand workouts. I need one workout and I need to be the right workout for today that I'm, that I'm doing that I know will progress me. So, um, that's kind of the, the sort of framework of how we built ladder.

12:50And then the experience is really where like the magic happens. So when you start a workout, you start playing your own music and uh your coach is in your ear your music kind of ducks down and your coach is leading you through the whole workout with voiceovers there are videos you can look at in the app like little looping demo videos from the coach but like if you you know i i'd say you know i i don't really look at the videos very often like i don't look at my phone when i work out um and so it's really cool because you feel like you're at the gym and like you just have your personal trainer right there just talking you through stuff um and it's it's a pretty pretty impressive experience.

13:27Philip Edsel:So I am like your bullseye ICP, you know, maybe not, I don't know if you're, how much you're focused on the UK, but in terms of like who I am, I'm bullseye, right? Like I'm a gym rat, always been an athlete, you know, played sports through college, et cetera, take competitive CrossFit, back injury. And now I just kind of like lift weights at the gym. And so, you know, historically, and I'm going to ask about AI, which obviously I'm sure you have a good answer for, but just talking about my own experience, you know, historically I just programmed my own workouts. Right. Um, and at one point I was actually a certified personal trainer.

14:02Philip Edsel:So it'd just be like every week, basically do kind of like what you guys are doing. Um, and now I actually find myself doing a bit of that, but actually using chat GPT, right. And there's a course limitations and I don't know how sustainable it's going to be. Cause of course it's going to probably just give me the same stuff for a while. Um, but I'd be curious how you all are thinking about not just the product development to differentiate, but also the brand development to differentiate against the people that either, you know, don't know about ladder yet, or like me now know about ladder, but are like, how is this going to be different than what I can get from AI already?

14:41Philip Edsel:Um, but I mean, one, I'm definitely going to check it out because I'd heard about you guys through, you know, Viren wanting to get you on the podcast, but I'm definitely going to be trying it now that I, now that I've seen it and heard a little bit more from you. Cool. Yeah. I know a guy, I can get you a code. Um, but, uh, no, I mean, that's a great question. And it's funny. You and I probably have a very similar background. I was, uh, you know, played sports, um, and all through high school, got recruited to play in college. I was a CrossFit coach for a while, although you wouldn't know it if I'm looking at me.

15:10Um, and, uh, so it's not like I didn't know what to do in the gym. Like I'm very comfortable in the gym. Uh, and you know, you'll find that like there's so many coaches that use ladder and personal trainers. And so it's not necessarily like the obvious, like, you know, casual fitness consumer. When we started, it was mostly like serious fitness consumers. The thing is, it doesn't matter if you're a coach and you're a pro or if you're, you know, sort of new to strength training, you don't want to do the brain damage of thinking about programming your own workout. Because ultimately, like the your your ideas will will get stale you'll end up doing the same things you'll you'll know you'll kind of hit a wall um and so to have somebody just tell you what to do even if you're a coach like the programs for other people all day to be able to show up and just turn your brain off is like um a pretty massive um you know benefit for for even people to know what they're doing so i was telling somebody last night that like you'd be shocked how many you know uh former athletes and coaches and stuff are using ladder in terms of ai you know i think it goes back to the point that I just mentioned of, it's not like the issue and the problem that we're solving is not, you know, more workouts.

16:19Like everyone has access to workouts. Doesn't matter if you have ChadGBT or YouTube or whatever. You know, it's like, it's not hard to necessarily build a workout. I think the big issue is you've got all these, you've got a ton of fitness apps that are AI coaches and like Whoop launches their AI coach and ChadGBT does their whole commercial about fitness and whatever. And I think at the end of the day, hey, what's really cool about what we're doing is we have created a platform and a product that is based on a real human expert's knowledge. It's like, you know, our coaches have been coaching for, you know, many of them, 10, 15 plus years, been doing one-to-one coaching, group fitness, all that sort of stuff.

17:00And they take all that knowledge and they distill it down into really incredible programming. And then on top of that, we use it or as a user, you get to use AI to sort of like basically enhance that experience. So whether it's tracking your workouts and logging your weights and progressing over time or the nutrition feature, which is a whole nother thing we can get into. But like we use some incredible AI tools for that feature. It really feels like the best of both worlds because you're getting the expert who is programming a progressive plan in six weeks. So instead of chat GBT with saying like, here's a workout for you to do today, you know, or I'm sure it can build you a six week plan too, but you've got a real expert that has done it, that has been there.

17:48And adding that sort of authority, like I think is really important. And so what we do is like, we're not trying to fight AI. We're trying to use that to leverage our coaches expert knowledge. And I think like, it's a huge reason why people are obsessed with their coaches and with ladder is like, they actually trust the person. And, you know, in marketing, I can't tell you how much like not only like slop do, you know, AI slop do I see, but also like the backlash to AI is pretty wild. It's like even people that use it don't want to see it in their products or their marketing necessarily. So we're not quite there yet.

18:25But I mean, I think it's I think it's great. But I think we've built something that's really special and sort of like a hybrid of both. Yeah.

18:32Philip Edsel:I mean, it's probably similar to how we think about our business and just the agency model in general is like, if you're a mid-size, if you're a coffee shop in Austin, which would be probably your equivalent of maybe a passive, goes to the gym a little bit, but not really, not kind of like a true fitness person, let's say, then that stuff is probably going to get replaced. right like the coffee shop in austin can probably have ai do their marketing yeah but you know xerox who we just launched the global rebrand for like they're not going to have ai do their marketing but they are going to have a company that kind of blends the best of what humans can do with the best of what technology can do um and that's kind of yeah i think yeah go ahead no i was gonna say it's interesting like you know i'm seeing all these uh new ai companies and tools that are essentially like taking you know your brand guidelines whether that's like your actual visual elements your logos all that sort of stuff or your copy or whatever and then those sort of agentic you know tools are essentially like recreating those and repurposing those for all the different channels because like you know this is a is like head of an agency you're doing a rebrand you're giving them like essentially like the tools and like the um you know the the the PDF that like spells it all out, but you're not going to be there when they launch a new channel and need a, you know, need to design X, Y, and Z, or maybe you are, but like, you know, most agencies sort of hand it off and to have these tools that sort of take it from there and then like can actually follow the brain guidelines and, and sort of distill that into all these different channels is super helpful.

20:09Same thing about how we think about, you know, what we're doing, which is like, we have expert coaches that are doing the creation of the programming and you can trust them, but then there are all these AI tools in the app that are going to enhance your experience, give you better insights, all that sort of stuff that, that our humans necessarily can't do on a scale that, you know, we we'd like to do it. So cool.

20:31Philip Edsel:I'm going to jump around a little bit because I think actually this is a good segue to talk more about the marketing that you're doing at ladder. Although I do, we're definitely going to come back to chapter one, which the, the, the title of chapter one of the brief is most marketing is bad. Here's why. So we will get there, but I think this nicely tees up and people will have in their mind, the business and the product of ladder. And so let's match it with kind of the marketing and how you're thinking about it. Um, so ladder, definitely a challenger brand. You guys have been scaling, um, you know, very successfully.

21:01Philip Edsel:Um, I guess let's start with like, what has kind of been the playbook? What have been kind of like the big pillars of what has driven the success of the brand and the marketing so far? Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, we created an app that is very contrarian by nature it doesn't look like all the other fitness apps that are out there um and it was because like we felt like there was a better experience that's sort of how we treat our marketing too um and maybe it's just because um i don't know that's kind of how i think about marketing is like i don't want to do the same thing as everyone else uh and so you know we we treat our marketing from a pretty contrarian perspective where it's we're not looking at what what other brands are doing in the fitness space.

21:43We're not looking at, um, necessarily what's trending. Although, you know, a lot of times there's obviously overlap and we try to stay relevant. Um, I think it's more so like, what are the actual insights that we know to be true? And like, what, how is that going to, how do we sort of turn that into campaigns and messaging that resonates? I think, um, we'll get there later on, on sort of why I think most marketing, you know, fall short of that, but it's just because they're not, they're not operating from like real insights or real truths, or they're not willing to say it, or they can't say it because they're, you know, the product doesn't, uh, you know, live up to it or whatever it is.

22:20So I think for us, it's just like our marketing is sort of built like our product where we just want to operate from first principles and say what we believe in, like kind of stand on that, um, and, and do it in a way that feels fresh. Yeah.

22:34Philip Edsel:It's interesting. And maybe we can just, let's just mash these two conversations together because of course it's impossible to separate why most marketing is bad and you're as we like to say strong opinion strongly held um about how to do that differently with what you've done for ladder and the playbook that you've put in place um but it's interesting you know having all these conversations all these interviews so many of the success stories whether it's a brand overall or a specific campaign come from Yes, like the right customer insight. You know, I think at the end of the day, all growth comes from delivering better, different value to the customer.

23:11Philip Edsel:And I think most bad advertising comes from and you're kind of saying the same thing. Everything not being focused on that, right? Anything that is not about the customer or you get the customer wrong.

23:25Philip Edsel:Creates a higher likelihood that your advertising will be less effective or just bad. But thinking about some of the conversations that I've had and also, and I'd love you to react to this, there's not just like starting from the right place, right? Like operating from the right insight. But there's also kind of the role that the CMO has to play in like protecting the development of the campaign and the advertising from all of those things that might try to pull it away from what that insight was or what's going to deliver value, right? Right. And I think that that is easier. You know, I sit in kind of the middle or on the fence between talking to challenger CMOs like you and then also talking to CMOs at Xerox or like bigger incumbent businesses.

24:13Philip Edsel:And I think that the challengers get more better advertising in part because there is less in the way or less that is pulling the marketing away from the customer insight and what's going to add value. um so i'd love your reaction to that and how much do you think about your role whether intentionally or maybe you just haven't thought about it like this but this is actually what you do of like it's not just where you start from but it's also kind of like protecting the development of the work from anything that's going to pull it away from where you started yeah that's a great insight my answer is going to be exactly the same which was yeah uh in a lot of ways i mean there there are a million um obstacles and things that make it harder to be the challenger brand but one of them is not layers or red tape and that's like one of the biggest things that or one of the biggest advantages the challenger brands have is like you know we can be off the wall we can we can troll a little bit we can like you know be a little bit um controversial where we need to be or we feel like it's right to be because um you We don't have the legacy of 50 years or whatever it is of doing things XYZ way.

25:30For me, what's really amazing is our marketing decisions essentially get made by me. And then I take it to our CEO. And he is incredible because not only does he understand all the inner workings and mathematics of how the business works, but he has a great marketing mind too. And he gets it.

25:46Philip Edsel:He's just like, totally, I understand that. Or he thinks like, yeah, it's huge. um or he thinks like well i feel like the focus right now is xyz and he's one of his like super powers is just being like ruthlessly prioritized on like what matters at the right time um so he's he's a really good sounding board for that but basically like that's the that's the process and then i take it to my team and obviously we iterate on stuff but like there wasn't really like a lot of hoops to jump through in order for us to get to the idea um and so there's not a lot there's not a lot I have to protect it from thankfully yeah um other than like external reaction so yeah I mean that's kind of what I was thinking like you think of a traditional big incumbent corporate organization there's like a gauntlet that the CMO has to run to try to keep the idea on track as it gets pulled by legal and financial and like highest paced how was the highest paid person's opinion internally and stuff like that like you don't have a gauntlet you just have one step yeah the uh the first the first like big uh campaign that we did in terms of like not only sort of production spin but also just like reaction and distribution that it got um was it was like i guess two years ago now we uh peloton released we had been seeing inklings from like uh peloton of like mentioning ladder or like you know internally and like just some some interesting things were like okay we're on their radar we kind of knew that um we obviously didn't feel like we were competing with Peloton at the time or didn't really just think about them very often but they released a beta in September I don't know if it was maybe 2024 and it was basically like a not like literal knockoff of a ladder like they didn't even change the colors they didn't change any of the UI it was like screen for screen on every screen just ladder and obviously they thought we're Peloton we'll get away with it and didn't realize that they were dealing with A, somebody that can be very petty and a troll but B, a challenger brand that we're not legal is not knocking down our door being like you can't do this so it was funny if you go to joinmire.com slash I think it's flattered you'll see the whole story and we have we pulled all the analytics because there were a bunch of developers and their entire product team that signed up for ladder using their peloton emails which was like again sort of just hubris in general but um we saw we logged all their sessions and like you could see they were looking at all these buttons they were clicking all these screens doing all this you know testing and essentially like ripping off the app like we had the we came with the receipts to back it up um and so we launched basically they launched that in september uh got on the beta downloaded it and and could see it was the exact same thing and so we essentially just created a campaign ripping off the old macros pc which is like one of the most beloved campaigns of all time um with like the personified peloton instructor and then like our instructors and so when they uh released the actual app to the public which was like i don't know three months later actually it's really funny we were doing a giant we had our whole team here we were on set doing a when they announced the app was live to the public.