Case Study 01
The Brief
"I don't have time." We heard it so many times it became the idea.
Orangetheory had a great workout. Nobody was showing up. And every time we talked to people, the excuse was the same. Not "I'm not motivated." Not "it's too expensive." Just "I don't have time."
Every fitness brand on earth hears that and responds by selling harder. More abs. Louder music. Someone screaming at you from a screen. We did the opposite. We stopped selling fitness altogether.
CLIENT
Orangetheory Fitness
Agency
Tombras
Role
Creative Director
Year
2022-2024
Industry
Fitness
Integrated
Film
Brand Identity
Social
In-Studio
The insight
People don't lack time. They feel like every hour already belongs to someone else.
The people saying "I don't have time" have the same 24 hours as everyone else. The problem was never the clock. It was the guilt. The overwhelm. The feeling that every single hour is already spoken for by your job, your kids, your commute, your inbox.
So we asked a simple question: what if there were a 25th hour? One hour that doesn't belong to anybody but you. And Orangetheory is where you spend it.
We found the tension in people's lives and built everything around it.
Once we had that, the tone of everything changed. It went from "push harder" to "you deserve this." The visuals got more human. The response was immediate - because we weren't selling a workout anymore. We were selling something people already wanted to feel.
The work
One idea. Built into everything.
The 25th Hour wasn't a tagline. It was the entire system. Every piece of the campaign - broadcast spots, in-studio signage, social content, programmatic digital - came from the same insight and the same emotional territory. Nothing was bolted on.
The spots we shot felt more like short films than fitness ads. Real people, real tension, real relief. The gym was the resolution, not the subject. On the digital side, we adapted the concept to time-of-day targeting - morning ads about reclaiming your day, evening ads about not letting another one slip by. The message moved with the clock.
Social content walked people through the math of their own day, showing them where the 25th Hour already existed if they were willing to take it. And the in-studio work went beyond posters on walls. Clocks running at different speeds. Time-based member challenges. The physical space became part of the story.
That's the job. One insight held together across every channel because the same person was directing all of it.
The Results
What happened.
Impressions
Across TV, digital, social, and in-studio touchpoints.
Aided Awareness
The brand went from known to understood. Different thing entirely.
Studios
The campaign scaled with the brand as it expanded across markets.
Idea
One insight. One system. Every channel. That's how integrated work is supposed to work.
My Take
Five years on one brand taught me how I want to work forever.
This campaign keeps coming back to me because it proved something. The best briefs aren't about the product. They're about the tension in someone's life that the product happens to resolve. Find that and the creative almost writes itself.
The 25th Hour worked because it was true. Not clever-true. Actually true. Everyone really does feel like there aren't enough hours in the day. We just gave that feeling a name and attached it to a brand.
I didn't hand this insight to a team and walk away. I was in the edit suite, on the social shoots, reviewing the in-studio mockups. The same person who found the tension built the system around it. That's how you keep the work honest from brief to delivery.
