Peloton’s pandemic-powered growth left the business with a ‘bike-sized problem’.  There was a perception that Peloton was for older, more affluent customers and now needed to attract new, younger customers. However, these audiences were less interested in fitness hardware and were busy shaping fitness on their own terms; communities like #girlswholift and #hotgirlwalks were where the energy was.

This challenge became business-critical. The CEO asked for big bets only.

Peloton had already found some success with creator work on TikTok. We knew TikTok had reinvented and re-shaped reading and fashion into well-established verticals; fitness was likely next. But a creator deal wasn’t a big bet. So we brought both teams together and suggested supersizing this into a much bigger, broader strategic partnership.

This partnership became the cobranded #TikTokFitness Powered by Peloton (#TFPbP), a first of its kind - a multi-market partnership and, many months later, required both CEOs and Bytedance China to agree and signoff.

Part of Peloton’s ‘Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime’ proposition, this new co-branding seamlessly combined fitness, lifestyle, and entertainment, breaking free from industry definitions of fitness. The launch of the new freemium app became central to the campaign.

The partnership was hugely challenging for content and marketing teams at both Peloton and Tiktok: reflecting real-time community-first fitness and trends; identifying fitness and fitness-adjacent creators; sharing content off-platform on the other partner's platform; sharing proprietary data; co-branding and marketing and beyond.

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The partnership included:

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• Peloton's class content debuted on TikTok for the first time ever, offering always-on class content and live streams of classes.

• An H5 page editorial hub, that hosted all #TikTokFitness content from instructors and creators. All searches for fitness pushed to the hub, making it the defacto home of fitness on TikTok.

• Around 100 TikTok creator films created as part of the partnership.

• Additional added value included “AnyTimeAnyWhere” Branded Missions encouraging UGC assets.

• This activity and promotional offers created significant cultural energy, driving audiences to the freemium Peloton app to intuitively connect audiences to their community.