With less than five weeks until the end of the year, and with most brands still on their way to Christmas, Spotify has launched a global outdoor ad campaign that says goodbye to a year full of turmoil, powerful messages, beauty and also some pretty weird stuff. And in keeping with last one, Spotify’s in-house agency has rolled out company’s surprising data – and not the usual trends and charts, but exactly the ones about weird stuff. Thus, inspired by data from their most peculiar listeners and pop-culture topics relevant to various events happening throughout the year, the Swedish company that has “soundtrack your life” presents us with this year’s wrapping-up tagline “Thanks, 2016. It’s been weird.”
The music-streaming company, that was launched in Stockholm in 2008, has now a library of more than 30 million songs that over 100 milion monthly-active users can choose from, and based on their listening preferences Spotify has decided to launch the campaign in the U.S., the U.K., France and Germany on Monday, November 28th and then to a further 10 markets (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Indonesia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines and Sweden).
These OOH ads read quirky, witty remarks with localized facts and the idea for Spotify’s biggest-ever brand campaign takes inspiration with its end-of-the-year feature called “Year in Music” that provided the listeners with a personalized look at their year in music and the page let them scroll through a rundown of their top songs, artists, and genres of 2015, along with some aggregate stats like the total minutes of played music or the number of songs and artists listened to. Spotify’s Chief Marketing Officer, Seth Farbman, explains how this “led to the idea of reflecting culture via listener behaviour” and who this data — acquired from listeners from all over the globe — provided interesting insights.
He also illustrates how “there has been some debate about whether big data is muting creativity in marketing, but we have turned that on its head. For us, data inspires and gives an insight into the emotion that people are expressing.” And from the campaign developed in-house by Spotify’s internal creative team based in New York we can see how these insights, that were provided by regional teams around the world, bring merit.
The end product is hauntingly interesting, for example, a U.K. poster reads: “Dear 3,749 people who streamed ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’ the day of the Brexit Vote, Hang in There.” On the other hand, another U.S. banner presents an even more interesting message: “Dear person who made a playlist called: ‘One Night Stand With Jeb Bush Like He’s a Bond Girl in a European Casino.’ We have so many questions.”
This also gives the company to a unique chance to super-localize the executions to different places – after resurrecting London’s leading night-club one in the UK reads: “To 21,043 people who played ‘Dancing On My Own’ the day Fabric closed, You weren’t.” – or even an event: “To the person who listened to ‘I Took a Pill in Ibiza’ 52 times on the 9th February’, Everyone celebrates Pancake Day differently.” So, from Paris to Berlin, Spotify’s has launched a campaign that might show other big companies how to use their ‘priceless’ data not only to show off their impressive figures, but also how to cheekily incorporate trending (or in this case rather ‘weird’) events to complement the company’s services.
