strategy deconstruction
Firstly, what is a social media campaign? According to Google it is a preplanned string of marketing strategies on social media to reach a distinct set of goals within a timeframe.
With that definition and as an avid music listener myself, I thought of Spotify and its annual “Spotify Wrapped.”
Spotify Wrapped was first officially created in 2016, previously called Year in Music in 2015. Spotify Wrapped is a comprehensive data collection of users’ music habits from the first of January to early/mid-November. Towards the end of the year, Spotify releases a unique, customized animated slideshow featuring the user’s favourite genres, artists, songs, comedic insights, and the total calculated minutes of the user’s listening activity.
Former Spotify design intern Jewel Ham is the creative mind behind Spotify Wrapped, but was previously denied proper credit for her concept.
The primary platform used for this campaign is Instagram. It is solely used by users to share and compare their data on their 24-hour stories, as everyone has their unique data and numbers and can’t wait to see what others receive. It has become highly anticipated for Spotify users.
The Wrapped target audience is strictly Spotify users, and it caters only to them, as it requires a year’s worth of use to collect data accurately.
Spotify Wrapped’s goals are to increase social media shares, solidify brand loyalty, and maximize user engagement with the app.
The content strategy for Spotify Wrapped concludes with animated visuals, interactive elements, and artist clips. All designed to uniquely match the user’s activity and make receiving and watching your gift a special moment. Every year has its own theme, colour palette and layout to differentiate from previous and following years, but all the Wrapped share the same collection of data that matches the user’s activity.
Filler Header Image - Image taken by Nailia Seale
Spotify creates a complimentary playlist of all the users’ most-played songs and saves them to the user’s account, naming them “Your Top Songs (year)”, so the user can see how their musical taste has grown and/or changed. Lastly, the Wrapped includes an “artist clip ” , a 30-second or less video clip where your favourite artists record a message for their fans, usually expressing gratitude and promoting new projects. Users receive only one video, usually from their top artist, and can choose to share it with friends or on social media.
Instagram is the perfect platform for this content because it is best for recent, up-to-date events, especially its 24-hour stories. A quick and clean post to share with your followers and your followers share with you. On “Spotify Wrapped Day,” everyone’s wrapped is posted in their stories for everyone to see, making it hard to miss and unavoidable (from personal experience).
Since 2015/2016, Spotify Wrapped has become highly anticipated, attracting brand recognition and loyalty, and every year inflicting jealousy among users of alternative music apps. According to the 2018 Q4 Spotify Shareholder Letter, Spotify received almost 7 million subscribers through the campaign, including a single-day record of almost half a million new subscribers.
(Safe to say it was a bit successful.)
Moving on to my critique, the idea of a carefully curated, personalized collection of data “Wrapped” into an aesthetically pleasing, interactive piece is a fantastic campaign. It gives curious users something to look forward to and lets others know how excited they are. Ultimately, Spotify did an amazing job at giving people something to talk about, and that’s the most successful part of this whole campaign. What could have been improved is more in-depth data for all 12 months, more specific data on the genres, and a little more personalization wouldn’t hurt either. I might be a little biased because I am one of Spotify’s top listeners myself, having reached a personal best of almost a quarter of a million minutes of listening every year since 2017. I believe the concept of Spotify Wrapped is incredibly admirable and a seemingly genius way to gather users together and celebrate “Spotify Wrapped Day.”