Marketing has never had more data. Every click can be tracked, every impression counted and every campaign dissected in real time. Yet much of the work produced by modern marketing still feels disconnected from the people it is supposed to reach.
Philip Edsel thinks he knows why.
The Ladder VP of Brand & Creative's diagnosis is surprisingly simple. The problem isn't creativity, budget or execution. It's self-awareness.
"Most marketing is bad."
Not because marketers lack talent. But instead, it’s because too many brands have lost touch with the conversations that should be shaping their decisions. They spend more time discussing what they want to say than understanding what people actually care about. The result is work that feels polished but irrelevant, strategically sound but culturally disconnected. For Edsel, self-awareness is "the number one attribute of a great marketer" because everything else sits downstream of it. Understanding how customers see you. Understanding what's happening in culture. Understanding when a moment is emerging and when it has already passed. Without those inputs, even the strongest creative ideas are built on weak foundations.
The Cost of Losing Touch
At Ladder, staying connected to members isn't treated as a research exercise. It's an operating principle. The company runs member surveys that can take as long as 45 minutes to complete, with thousands of members participating. Coaches are active in team chats every day, answering questions directly and hearing concerns in real time. Feedback doesn't arrive quarterly in a presentation deck. It flows continuously through the business.
"We don't listen to what our investors tell us to do. We listen to what our members actually want from our app and our experience."
That feedback loop shapes product decisions, but it also shapes marketing decisions. Edsel's view is that many brands spend too much time searching for insights and not enough time paying attention to the ones already sitting in front of them. Teams gather in workshops, commission research and refine positioning statements while customers are telling them exactly what matters. The challenge is staying close enough to hear it.
Brands that begin with their own objectives tend to create marketing designed to communicate a message. Brands that begin with customers are more likely to create marketing that reflects something people already care about. One approach starts with a campaign and looks for an audience. The other starts with an audience and discovers a campaign. Coincidentally (or not) it also ensures you have some of the highest retention rates industry-wide
Culture Doesn't Send You an Invitation
The same logic extends beyond customers and into culture. For years, marketers could rely on large shared moments that reached almost everyone at the same time. Today, algorithms have fragmented attention into thousands of parallel conversations. Different audiences are consuming different content, following different creators and participating in different cultural worlds.
"Culture and algorithms are so fragmented these days that it's like not everyone's seeing the same thing at the same time."
Edsel's response is simple. Every Monday morning he blocks time on his calendar to understand what people are talking about. He reads newsletters like After School and spends time on social platforms. In an environment where attention moves quickly, awareness can't be something marketers assume they'll absorb by accident. That discipline shows up in unexpected places. It’s part of why the brand ended up as the only fitness app Apple has ever featured at WWDC 25, and was later name-checked again in Apple’s WWDC 26 rap video.
That matters because timing is often the difference between relevance and irrelevance. Most brands eventually notice the same shifts. The difference is when. By the time many organizations have identified a trend, written a brief, developed creative and secured approval, the conversation has already moved on. "By the time most marketers think of it on their own without actually putting their head into it, it's probably too late." Brands arrive just as the moment is ending and mistake participation for relevance. That's how marketing ends up on what Edsel describes as "the tail end of that bell curve," producing work that feels current internally but dated everywhere else.
The Hilary Duff Arbitrage
That focus on timing shaped one of Ladder's biggest marketing bets. On the surface, the company's partnership with Hilary Duff looked like a celebrity campaign. Edsel saw something else.
Celebrity marketing is a strategy he generally dislikes. Too often, brands pay for recognition and hope relevance follows. What interested Ladder wasn't the celebrity itself. It was momentum. Duff had been vocal about strength training, and millennials who grew up watching Lizzie McGuire were entering a stage of life where strength, fitness and longevity were becoming more important. At the same time, she was having a broader cultural moment.
"There was still arbitrage there."
The opportunity wasn't simply that Hilary Duff was famous. It was that her growing relevance aligned with a shift already taking place within Ladder's audience.
"Hilary was having this massive moment in culture where she's going viral."
The team believed there was an inflection point coming, and what happened afterwards exceeded expectations. Looking back, Edsel's interpretation is that the opportunity came from recognizing momentum that already existed rather than attempting to manufacture it.
Marketing That Gives People Nothing
The same philosophy shapes how Edsel thinks about content.
"Most brands just post to hit a quota."
His criticism isn't really about social media. It's about usefulness. Too much content exists because a channel needs filling or a publishing schedule demands it. Output becomes the objective. Whether the content is useful, entertaining or genuinely interesting becomes secondary.
No format captures this problem better than the teaser post.
"That is just so bad. It gives me nothing."
It's a small observation, but it reflects a broader belief. The best marketing creates value before it asks for attention. The worst marketing assumes attention is already owed. One starts with the audience, and the other starts with the brand.
Better Awareness
For Edsel, that's what sits beneath everything else. Not better campaigns, better content or better technology.
Better awareness.
The ability to understand how customers see you, to recognize shifts in culture before they become obvious, and to separate what your audience cares about from what your organization wants to talk about.
Marketing has never had more tools for understanding people. Edsel's argument is that tools are not the same thing as awareness. Awareness still requires proximity. Proximity to customers, culture, and the conversations shaping both.
In a category obsessed with getting attention, that may be one of the few advantages that still can't be automated.
