After being named Adweek’s Breakthrough and International Agencies of the Year, Gut keeps winning. Gut Miami has been appointed global AOR for WeightWatchers, following a competitive review that was conducted in-house.
The agency will be responsible for collaborating with the brand team to launch U.S. and global campaigns supporting the portfolio of products, providing ongoing brand strategy guidance and overseeing production.
The Miami-based agency will also help manage ideas, messaging and executions for the legacy weight loss brand, along with creative leadership on WeightWatchers’ efforts to disrupt, differentiate and reintroduce itself to the marketplace. Gut will advise on creative effectiveness to further focus on building current and potential consumer trust, credibility and affinity for the brand.
“We wanted to find a partner who could help us transform our business, disrupt ourselves, build our brand for the long term and ultimately positively impact the lives of millions of people looking to find optimal solutions for their weight health,” said Amanda Tolleson, global chief marketing officer at WeightWatchers.
The decision to partner with Gut comes at a time when WeightWatchers is looking to strengthen its position in the clinical, behavioral and digital weight healthcare landscape, following its entrance into the clinical telehealth space earlier this year. The company acquired Sequence, a subscription telehealth platform for chronic weight management, for $132 million, which helps them compete with prescription weight loss drugs like Ozempic.
Gut Miami has already been working behind the scenes with WeightWatchers on a number of projects and is looking to launch a larger campaign in early 2024.
“We’re very focused on making sure our brand is relevant, embedded in culture and attracting a next generation of WeightWatchers members,” said Tolleson.
Finding the right fit for an expanding business
WeightWatchers, which was called WW from 2018 until last year, has made the leap into telehealth with Sequence to help those dealing with obesity, and the company now sees itself as one that covers the “full weight health spectrum, from overweight to living with obesity,” according to Tolleson.
To help communicate that to the public and potential clients, Tolleson, who has been at WeightWatchers a little over a year, wanted to find the right agency partner, so she took the time to think through the needs of the company, how it needed to communicate the portfolio of offerings, and how it could take the brand global. It found that in Gut.
Tolleson looked for an agency that would be bold and push boundaries, one that would pull the brand outside its comfort zone as well take a digital native approach to how it thinks about creative from the ground up. She also wanted an agency that would be able to collaborate with WeightWatchers’ in-house creative team to formulate solutions.
“We’re a very people-first agency, and we could feel on the other side that it was the same way. Everybody had a voice in the room and we had a voice in the room… it was like one team trying to figure out where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do together. And the excitement was palpable,” said Andrea Diquez, global CEO at Gut.
Tolleson added that the company needs to get better at feature marketing for its app, since 80% of its members now are app-only users. Gut has experience there, but also can handle bold creative, launch new features and be the go-to for the company’s advocacy work, helping improve the lives of people living with obesity.
“It’s a wide spectrum, and you might think, ‘Oh, I need to have different agencies for these different things.’ And what has been great about Gut is that they can span that kind of creativity spectrum and deliver great work,” said Tolleson.
In the past, WeightWatchers has worked with various agencies, including Anomaly and recently Maximum Effort, but Gut will be the lead for the company moving forward as its AOR.
What excites Tolleson about the collaboration with Gut is the potential to drive real cultural change in a way that is positive for society, in particular for people living with obesity who have often been overlooked and underserved.
Diquez added that she and many others at Gut are fans of the brand and that their collaboration is one built around mutual respect.
“It’s a brand that can really change the world, because of what it is and how the world is today in terms of people living with obesity. So we want to be part of that,” said Diquez.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the 2022 measured media spend for WeightWatchers is $67 million, according to COMvergence.
