Ladder is one of the fastest growing fitness subscription apps right now and they are running a lot of ads on Meta. In this breakdown, I reviewed 69 of their video ads and analyzed more than 500 App Store reviews to understand what is really driving their growth and where the biggest opportunities still are. Three things stood out. First, their ads barely mention community and accountability even though those are some of the most praised features in their App Store reviews. Second, they are barely running display ads, which is surprising because display placements unlock completely different audiences and can often double scale for subscription apps. Third, there is a heavy visual concentration in their creatives. Many ads look visually similar, which can lead to audience saturation as spend scales. In this video I break down how Ladder could potentially 2x their creative velocity by mining customer reviews for messaging, repurposing their best hooks into display formats, and increasing visual diversity in their ad creatives.
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Unlocking Growth: Key Opportunities for Ladder’s Ad Strategy
Ladder can 2x their creative velocity. I roasted their ad strategy to identify three big opportunities that they’re sitting on.
For those of you who are not aware, Ladder was a finalist for Apple’s App of the Year 2025. They have an average rating of 4.9, and they’ve been running ads that focus on their coaches and some very interesting TikTok-native hooks, like the calendar hooks that you can see here.
So clearly, they’re doing a lot of things right. And they are advertising quite heavily right now on Meta.
But as I said, they are sitting on a lot of opportunity with their Meta ads, and I have three roasts for them, plus one meta roast that shows exactly how they can 2x their creative velocity.
First of all, I reviewed about 69 video ads and 500 App Store reviews, and I noticed something very interesting.
They have 93% five-star reviews, which is great. You can see the word cloud from their reviews: team, coach, home, gym, trainer, all good.
The ads have a very clear point of view in terms of what they’re focused on. But the big gap I noticed is that there’s very little mention of team, community, or belonging in their ads, which seems to show up very prominently in their App Store reviews.
That’s the curious part here, and that is their big opportunity.
The customers are actually talking about what they value the most. The customers are talking about what they find most valuable in the app, and the ads don’t really reflect that.
I think that’s a big opportunity. Just by mining their customer reviews and focusing on what their users actually want, they can unlock a new level of growth within their ads.
Now, these are three examples of how they could focus on team, community, and accountability within the ads. You can look at this, and you can see that users are very passionate about their teams and their coaches, and really, the ads could double down on a lot of these.
The second big opportunity is that there are no display ads, which is surprising.
In my meta roast, I will talk about why I think this could be happening.
But the big reason to run display ads is that they unlock different placements.
Display ads show on feeds. Video ads typically show on reels and, to some extent, on feeds as well.
More importantly, these unlock completely different user demographics. They reach users in completely different contexts, and that can unlock a ton of scale.
That is the big opportunity they’re sitting on.
For a lot of brands, this can literally 2x their scale, 2x their revenue, while maintaining profitability.
The lowest-hanging fruit here is to repurpose their best hooks as display ads.
They already have a lot of high-performing hooks. They already have videos that lead with text. A lot of these could be repurposed as display ads.
I would start there when building out display ads.
Rule number three is creative concentration.
A lot of ads show a gym-based setting. There’s a coach in a gym, you can see that here.
Now, this is the Andromeda problem.
Meta’s algorithm is going to treat visually similar ads as the same creative, even if they’re slightly different.
And because a lot of these ads show similar setups, different coaches, different outfits, they still end up reaching very similar audiences.
That leads to audience saturation.
And I think that is a time bomb they’re sitting on.
As they scale, this will become more and more of a problem.
The fix for that is to introduce more visual formats.
More diversity.
Different styles.
This helps break visual monotony and reduce creative fatigue.
And I think that’s the big opportunity they have to unlock more scale going forward.
Now I’ll come to the meta roast.
They’re not a small team. They have a fairly large team. They run partnership ads. They have a strong, polished brand aesthetic, which shows in a lot of their ads.
So what I see as the root cause of some of their scaling challenges is this:
Brand consistency is coming at the expense of experimentation.
Again, disclaimer, I haven’t talked to their team. I haven’t seen their brand guidelines.
This is based on what I see in the Meta Ads Library and what I’ve seen from comparable apps and products that struggle with this exact tension between brand and performance.
There’s often a team that is very protective of the brand and doesn’t want to deviate into testing different formats, aesthetics, or messaging styles.
And there is a real cost to that.
That tension, between brand and performance, is what I think is their biggest challenge right now.
This trade-off has real consequences for growth.
Even if they’re not feeling it yet, they will.
That’s what’s coming.
From that perspective, their challenge is organizational.
Because they’re not unaware. They’re likely seeing competitors experiment.
But it’s very possible that internally, the reaction is:
“This is too low-brow.”
“This is too lo-fi.”
“We don’t want to do this.”
Which is fair.
But it comes at a cost.
Once they address this, I think they can unlock each of the three opportunities I mentioned earlier.
So in summary, these are the three big opportunities:
Focus on community, your customers are already talking about it.
Display is overdue.
Focus on visual diversity.
And the meta takeaway:
Think about what in your organizational setup is holding you back.
If you found this helpful, please hit subscribe.
And if you’d like me to analyze your brand, or produce ads for you based on this kind of analysis, feel free to reach out.
Thank you.
