How The Now Agency Is Rethinking YouTube for Fitness Brand Building
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Most brands treat YouTube like a filing cabinet. Upload a video, hope someone finds it, move on. Gabe Feldman, founder of The Now Agency, and Phillip Mills, Managing Director of Les Mills, are done with that playbook. Their new six-part docuseries, RISE: Search for the Ultimate Trainers, is the most visible proof yet of what happens when a fitness brand stops distributing content and starts building an audience.
RISE: Search for the Ultimate Trainers launched April 13 on the Les Mills YouTube channel as a six-episode docuseries following elite fitness trainers competing for a place on the Les Mills global filming team, the people behind workouts reaching 7 million people every week across 23,000 gyms worldwide. But the structure was just as deliberate as the story.
Each episode drops weekly, broken into multiple parts, with short-form cutdowns feeding discovery and a companion vodcast, RISE Reactions, hosted by Les Mills presenter Bas Hollander, keeping the community engaged between drops. The goal wasn't a viral moment. It was compounding attention.
"We weren't just asking how do we get people to watch," Feldman explained. "We were asking how do we get them to come back next week."
That question sits at the heart of where fitness content is heading. Attention has never been harder to earn, and it's even harder to keep. Both Feldman and Phillip Mills agreed; consistency and quality aren't a choice between one or the other. You need both, but without a story, neither one is enough.
Phillip Mills put it plainly: "Fitness is the biggest participation sport in the world and trainers are the heart of it but very few people ever see what it takes to perform at the absolute top of the profession." RISE was built to close that gap, not with polish, but with access.
From the Les Mills side, RISE wasn't just a content experiment.
To mark the launch, Les Mills also began sharing a range of its legendary workouts free on YouTube, opening the platform to new audiences who may never have engaged with the brand before . The series drives interest; the free workouts convert it. That funnel logic is intentional.
For Phillip Mills, the bigger picture is about brand authority in a world where content is the product. Building a global fitness brand through classes and equipment alone isn't enough anymore. The story of who's delivering those workouts and what it costs them is part of what keeps people loyal.
For fitness brands watching from the sidelines, both Feldman and Phillip Mills pointed to the same starting point: stop thinking in campaigns and start thinking in cadence. Pick a format, commit to a drop schedule, and build supporting content around it.
Short form for discovery, long form for depth, community content to hold the audience between episodes. One system, not three separate bets.
The brands not paying attention to this yet are the ones still measuring YouTube by view count. The ones winning are measuring by who came back.
Follow The Now Agency at thenow.agency and Les Mills at @lesmills on YouTube.
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This story was originally published April 30, 2026 at 10:01 AM.