UNITED WE MOVE

Creative Production Director
Planet Fitness

Planet Fitness - United We Move Case Study

When gyms shut down in March 2020, Planet Fitness had a choice: go quiet or figure out how to still be useful.

We built United We Move in two days.

“Work-outs” became “work-ins,” with free daily classes streamed live on Facebook and YouTube for anyone stuck at home. Gym membership not required.

Here’s the part that never makes it into the case studies: nobody really knew how to do this yet.

As Creative Production Director, I oversaw the production department, and suddenly we had to figure out how to broadcast live with instructors scattered across the country while none of us could actually be in the same room.

Every new instructor meant starting almost from scratch. Test their bandwidth. Ship them a computer and production gear they’d never used. Teach them how to use it remotely. Run a dress rehearsal. Build instructions simple enough for someone who wasn’t remotely tech savvy. Go live. Get the gear back. Check it. Reset it. Ship it to the next person. Repeat. Sometimes multiple times a week.

And sometimes nothing wanted to cooperate. I once spent about nine hours with a trainer troubleshooting one problem after another. We finally got everything working just before we went live.

All of this was being coordinated from my basement.

COVID was a crazy, stressful time for everyone, so it was nice to have something a little less stressful to worry about. Like broadcasting live to thousands of people around the world from someone else’s living room, with the client watching and no idea what might break next. What could possibly go wrong?

The live broadcasts were only part of it. We were also filming promos, creating content to drive people to each stream, producing hundreds of themed Home Work-Ins, and working with guest trainers including Caleb McLaughlin, Julian Edelman, Shawn Johnson, Tristan Thompson, Fortune Feimster, and Jerry O’Connell.

What started as a two-day response to gyms shutting down became a live content operation that ran from March through December 2020 and helped move more than 111 million people.

There was no playbook. So we made one.

AWARDS

  • Shorty Social Good Awards — Winner (Best in Fitness & Wellness)

  • Digiday Awards — Winner (Best Live Moment), Winner (Most Original Use of Social)

  • ANA International ECHO Awards — Silver (Health, Wellness & Pharmaceutical)