New Peloton paid influencer program: Peloton Creator Ambassadors & Peloton Creator Summit

Peloton quietly unveiled one of its newest marketing efforts called the Peloton Ambassador program last month.

Peloton’s ambassador program appears to be Peloton’s entry into the world of paid influencer marketing – which is an area Peloton’s Chief Marketing Officer had recently said Peloton would be exploring.

The participants, known as “Creator Ambassadors” were chosen by Peloton’s team in partnership with third party agency partners. There was no public request / signup put out for this program that anyone could register for.

The goal of this was likely to find influencers with a wide reach of people who might not already be on the Peloton platform. Peloton may have thought that people already part of the platform have already told their social circles about Peloton – so went to a different group of people.

As such – it appears that some of these paid influencers who are now Peloton Creator Ambassadors are just now trying Peloton for the first time, as part of applying & being accepted to the program. This is not the case with every member of the program – some are long-time members of the Peloton community. However, Peloton noted that these individuals were picked as the first set of Creator Ambassadors as they are all trusted voices in their respective fitness and wellness communities.

Partial group photo of the Peloton ambassador paid influencers. Image credit @OnePeloton. — Partial group photo of the Peloton Creator Ambassadors. Image credit @OnePeloton.

One of the perks of the Peloton Creator Ambassador program is that some of the members are getting loans of Peloton Bike+ or Tread to use while they are part of the program.

Peloton’s Chief Marketing Officer, Lauren Weinberg, recently told The Wall Street Journal that Peloton would be trying some new initiatives – including influencer marketing – as part of their goal to market to some areas they hadn’t typically focused on before, such as millennial men.

Weinberg mentioned how they had new features coming, such as the upcoming Zwift style cycling game and the Peloton Strength+ beta, and the article went on to state:

Now it plans to promote them in a way that better speaks to men than its campaigns historically have, advertising through media companies and influencers popular among male audiences.

This attempt to reach new market segments sounds similar to the partnership with TikTok announced earlier this year, or their recent enhanced advertising in Twitch’s “The Glitch” Fortnite game.

Peloton’s Creator Ambassador program appears to be the start of that paid influencer marketing Weinberg discussed. To start off their program, Peloton flew the new ambassadors to New York City at the end of September for what they called the “Peloton Creator Summit” – which saw the ambassadors receive a behind-the-scenes look at many things. The ambassadors were given rooms at a nearby Hyatt hotel, thanks to Peloton’s recent Hyatt partnership which kicked off this year.

Part of the Peloton Creator Summit involved a multi-hour session at the Peloton headquarters (located around the corner from PSNY). This saw the ambassadors sit through presentations from several different teams at Peloton, from legal, to marketing, and more.

Several Peloton instructors also came to the Peloton Creator Summit, helping to lead a presentation created specifically for the new ambassadors. The instructors who were present included:

Rad Lopez
Katie Wang
Callie Gullickson
Camila Ramon
Matty Maggiacomo

The ambassadors also had the opportunity to try out Peloton hardware in the office gym – and the day concluded with a group dinner & outing at a local New York City restaurant.

The initial class of Peloton Creator Ambassadors consists of 25 people. At the time of publishing, the following people had confirmed they were part of the Peloton ambassador program through posts they have shared on social media:

List of Peloton Creator Ambassadors

Throughout the weekend, the ambassadors also had the chance to take multiple classes at PSNY – including some of the 2024 All For One classes as the event took place at the same time.

Even as Peloton is spending money on paid influencer marketing (i.e. the Peloton Ambassador program), they are reducing spend in other areas. The same WSJ interview with Weinberg said:

In addition to trimming advertising overseas and concentrating its television advertising toward the end of the year, Peloton has reduced how much it is spending to promote the Peloton app while its product teams tinker to make it more user-friendly.

Peloton does not typically publicly share the effectiveness of particular marketing campaigns – so it may be hard to tell how beneficial this program ends up being to the company.

This new program comes as Peloton has reduced & decreased incentives for regular members to continue making referrals over the years. The most recent change to Peloton’s referral program was when Peloton reduced the maximum number of referrals per year from 12 to 6. This followed a change that only “owners” of accounts were able to take part in the referral program.

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