Spotify Wrapped 2023—see the data-driven out-of-home ads and personalized app features

It’s been a year of artificial intelligence, but Spotify instead focuses on “real” as a theme of its popular year-end “Wrapped” campaign, featuring a slew of out-of-home activations tailored to top artists as well as personalized app experiences. The audio streaming platform’s end-of-year campaign launched Wednesday morning in 170 markets around the world. It “celebrate[s] all the real stuff” with a major focus on emotion, cultural moments and relationships—those between artists and fans, as well as between users and their friends and family—said Marie Rönn, Spotify global group creative director, at a press conference on Tuesday. The artist-fan relationship is highlighted with OOH displays and activations and in the app experience, Rönn said. Interactive experiences will include lie-detector tests at locations in a handful of cities—a nod to the Ice Spice and PinkPantheress song “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” the fifth most-streamed song in the U.S. this year. A display in Atlanta depicts rapper Lil Yachty on an actual little yacht. Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Final deadline approaching for annual program Enter here “Wrapped or It Didn’t Happen” billboards will spotlight top Spotify artists and also reference notable or humorous data points among platform users, such as a “shout-out to the 200-plus people that created playlists titled ‘Dump Him’” in 2023, Rönn said. More from Ad Age: How fake OOH ads help and hurt the industry Along with the billboards, the in-app experience is also a key part of Wrapped and has been updated this year. “Me in 2023” assigns users one of 12 listening characters—such as the Time Traveler, who repeatedly listens to the same song; the Luminary, who plays upbeat music more than others do; and the Alchemist, who creates their own playlists more than others do. Another new feature called “Sound Town” matches users to a specific city around the world based on the songs and artists they engaged with most in 2023, said Emily Galloway, Spotify’s senior director of product design. That experience stems from the increasingly international listening behaviors of Spotify users, with genres such as Musica Mexicana, Afrobeats and K-pop further cementing themselves in U.S. consumers’ music habits. (Spotify’s latest “Culture Next” report found that 58% of Gen Z users enjoy music not in their native language.) This is Spotify’s ninth year of Wrapped, which in past years has become something of a cultural moment on the internet, particularly for Gen Z. The platform highlighted the campaign’s popularity at the press conference with a collage of posts from X including one from 2022 that read, “I can't wait for my psych analysis (spotify wrapped).” A core part of that pop-culture phenomenon involves Spotify users sharing their Wrapped results on social media. Tying back to the campaign’s emphasis on authenticity and imperfection, Spotify created “redcated” stickers for platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp that let users cover up any embarrassing inclusions in their top five artists or songs, Rönn said. Spotify also collected brief videos from thousands of artists offering a personal message to users who had those artists in their Wrapped results, including Taylor Swift (the most-streamed artist of the year, with over 26 billion global streams), K-pop group NewJeans, Dolly Parton and Bad Bunny, said Sulinna Ong, the platform’s global head of editorial. Some of those messages will include hints about upcoming releases or tours, Ong added. Spotify orchestrated another Swift activation—in the 48 hours leading up to the Wrapped rollout, it added puzzle pieces to 21 billboards in cities worldwide with various Easter eggs associated with Swift and her song “Cruel Summer,” teasing her status as the top artist this year, Ong said. Read more about Taylor Swift’s 2023 marketing presence Also, when users listen to Swift’s songs over the next several days, the bar showing their progress in a song will change colors to match the different “eras” of her music, and the dot in the bar will sparkle, Ong said. “That’s my personal favorite touch,” she said. Along with the global music chart of most-streamed artists, the campaign also crunches the numbers on podcasts. Check out more of the OOH campaign below.

Spotify Wrapped 2023—see the data-driven out-of-home ads and personalized app features

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