How WeightWatchers, Jenny Craig, and other diet brands are marketing in 2023

Wellness brands, diet plans, weight loss companies… you can’t count on what they’re calling themselves these days, but you can depend on their annual New Year’s resolution campaigns. Between Dec. 26 and Jan. 5, weight loss brands spent $41.9 million on linear TV ads alone, according to iSpot. But walking the line between encouraging brand messaging and, well, the Equinox approach can be tricky. (The health club chain’s “We Don’t Speak January” campaign, which pledged to not take new members on Jan. 1, proved polarizing.) Below, how the category’s major players are tackling the “New Year, New Me” season. Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here WeightWatchers Helmed by new Global Chief Marketing Officer Amanda Tolleson, WeightWatchers worked with Ryan Reynolds’s agency Maximum Effort (now the brand’s lead agency) for its 2023 New Year’s campaign. Playing on the idea that January is also the time of year when people return unwanted holiday gifts, a series of short videos show WeightWatchers customers returning what they don’t want in their wellness lives, such as a love/hate relationship with cookies. In the cookies spot, for instance, the WeightWatchers employee tells someone who wants to return that cookie baggage that she can keep the love part, and just return the hate. “That's really the heart of the brand—you can eat the food you love and still lose weight,” Tolleson said. The campaign is running across linear and streaming television, as well as paid and organic social media. WeightWatchers is also adding two programmatic podcast ads with Spotify to its New Year’s effort, with Tolleson saying it’s a “newer tactic” that the brand is testing. WeightWatchers began the campaign on Dec. 26—and it will continue indefinitely. “We’ll run it as long as it performs,” Tollseon said. “That’s how I treat campaigns.” She joined the brand as CMO in August 2022 from children’s brand Maisonette, where she also served as the chief marketing officer. Tolleson declined to share how much WeightWatchers spent on the campaign; but iSpot estimates that the company spent $13 million on linear TV ads between Dec. 26 and Jan. 5. The campaign comes as the brand has quietly begun embracing its full WeightWatchers name again after it had rebranded itself to WW in 2018. The company lately has been using both “WW” and “WeightWatchers” on its website and elsewhere. “We are embracing the WeightWatchers name,” Tolleson said. “We are ultimately here to help people in their weight loss journey.” Ad Age's Marketers of the Year The 10 marketers that broke through in 2022 See the full list here Jenny Craig Jenny Craig is also testing programmatic podcast ads on Spotify for its New Year’s campaign. “Like everyone, we see all of the excitement around podcast inventory,” Jenny Craig CMO Dan Hofmeister said. “We started dabbling in audio mid-last year, saw some decent success, and then added podcast inventory into our fall ’22 campaign,” he continued, adding that his team is now “leaning more directly” into the channel. The brand opted for programmatic rather than host-read ads as it’s still in a “test and learn” phase with podcast advertising, he said. Programmatic, he said, “was a way for us to see how certain inventory performs across different areas and get a good sampling right away in a fairly efficient way.” Hofmeister also said that, at least right now, programmatic podcast ads are cheaper than host-read ads. The larger campaign is rooted in two TV spots. The first, called “One Day,” follows real life Jenny Craig members along the path of their “one day” dream. “We all have that ‘one day’ dream: that I can fit into a dress, or that I can play with my kids, those types of things,” Hofmeister said. “We wanted to help bring to life how our members have accomplished that dream with Jenny Craig as their partner.” The second spot, called “Lost and Found,” highlights what Jenny Craig members “find as a result of losing things, like the weight that they’ve accrued over years past,” Hofmeister said. In addition to linear TV and Spotify, the media buy includes digital TV, paid social (this is Jenny Craig’s first time running paid TikTok ads for a campaign), influencer, digital display and print. Hofmeister declined to share how much money Jenny Craig budgeted for the campaign, but iSpot estimates that the brand spent just under $1 million on linear TV ads alone between Dec. 26 and Jan. 5. Jenny Craig worked with independent agency Quigley on the new creative. Noom While Noom did not respond to Ad Age’s request for comment, according to iSpot, it ran some customer-focused TV spots starting Dec. 26. The commercials, however, weren’t New Year’s or resolutions-themed, and some originally debuted in December 2021. Similarly, its Instagram grid posts also don’t seem to address the resolutions season outright. The TV spots, such as one called “School Principal,” show how Noom can help customers identify their eating habits through psychological approaches. Noom spent $1.1 million on national TV ads from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1, and $4.1 million between Dec. 26 and Jan. 5—though none of that was during New Year's-specific programming, according to iSpot. That $4.1 million number represents about 14% of Noom’s 2022 TV ad spend, which was $29.9 million. Nutrisystem Nutrisystem also did not respond to Ad Age’s request for comment, but it debuted several new linear TV spots in the days after Christmas. Most of the spots mention “this year” in their scripts, and one, showing before and after photos of people in football jerseys, is actually called “Diet Season” (perhaps in reference to football season). Nutrisystem ran TV ads during New Year's specific programming such as Fox News's "All-American New Year Live From Nashville" and Dec. 31's Music City Bowl on ABC, according to iSpot. It spent about $2.4 million on linear TV ads between Dec. 31 and Jan. 1, also per iSpot. 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How WeightWatchers, Jenny Craig, and other diet brands are marketing in 2023

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