iFIT boosts brand lift 61% by capitalizing on attention with Adelaide, not cheap reach
Illustration by Nick DeSantis / Getty / Shutterstock / The Current
IFIT, the premium integrated hardware and software fitness brand, is having major success in connecting attention metrics to brand lift, leading to higher sales.
iFIT, which owns NordicTrack, ProForm, Freemotion and Reform RX, was the first brand to integrate attention data from Adelaide and Upwave into its media buying strategy through The Trade Desk. Using tools that prioritize media quality while leveraging Adelaide’s segmentation directly into the platform helped iFIT achieve a 61% increase in aided awareness, a 17% increase in consideration and a 10% increase in favorability. IFIT accomplished all this with its agency, Agility.
Cheap reach and low CPMs can obscure the true value of a piece of inventory, Marc Guldimann, Adelaide’s founder and CEO, tells The Current. The company’s proprietary quality score, AU, offers buyers a score from 0 to 100 that shows the value of the impression before it’s bought.
Guldimann argues that the pre-bid quality of inventory is more useful than completion rates or time spent because those scores can be hacked and gamified. On their own, those proxy measurements can create an illusion of attention. But if you bid on cheap impressions, there’s no guarantee a user will watch your ad as each quarter completes.
“Higher quality audiences tend to be aligned to higher CPMs, and if you’re primarily chasing lower CPMs, you’re really creating tension in your media activation versus finding a high-quality audience,” Scott Symonds, iFIT’s head of growth initiatives, says. “You have to measure the outcomes. You need that ability to see revenue lift and conversion lift in order to rationalize the higher costs. But it’s quite easy when you see a 60% lift in awareness.”
Connecting the top of the funnel to the bottom
While Adelaide’s attention score goes from 0 to 100, channels have varying benchmarks. Connected TV (CTV) has the second highest score to cinema of any type of media.
For iFIT’s campaign, Agility leaned heavily into CTV, along with OTT, OLV, audio and digital out-of-home. All of the media was decisioned, rather than bought direct, which helped give the brand more control, efficiency and data targeting to work with.
Coupling that decisioning power with The Trade Desk’s Sellers and Publishers 500+ marketplace created a more focused target audience — a critical component of any campaign for iFIT, which knows its audience and place in the market well.
Its treadmills, ellipticals, rowing machines and bikes range from $899 to $15,000, meaning it can take years for someone to be in the market. Once they are interested, they may spend a month considering buying before they actually do.
This scope makes efficiency and precise targeting using first-party data and lookalike audiences crucial. Not everyone will buy one of its exercise machines, so reaching those who are more likely to buy is extra valuable.
“Reaching quality audiences with transparency is paramount,” Symonds says. And iFIT needed to be efficient with its upper-funnel ads to reach its customers “as impactfully and as frequently as we could.”
Adelaide was an “accelerator of that” by helping iFIT tie together lower-funnel conversion to upper-funnel ads. Being able to have more concrete upper-funnel measurement is one of the things Symonds was most excited about from the campaign. After four weeks of collecting data, there was enough to measure the campaign on a statistically significant scale.
Streamlining, simplifying and unifying programmatic campaigns
On top of that, the combination of turnkey solutions from Adelaide and Upwave, which measured iFIT’s brand lift, reduced setup and analysis time by 80% from four to five hours, previously done over weeks, to 45 minutes.
Streamlining, simplifying and unifying campaigns has been a consistent narrative of 2025, which Symonds says is music to media buyers’ ears in the complex world of programmatic.
The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc. This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.