Spotify expands ‘My Spotify’ campaign and ‘Daylists’ app feature

Spotify continues to emphasize hyper-personalization as its North Star, both in product and marketing, and it expands that focus in new “My Spotify” ads launching this month, with an emphasis on the year-old “Daylist” feature. “My Spotify” first rolled out in June with digital, social and out-home ads, as well as in-app experiences. The theme came from users themselves, as Spotify noticed them talking about “my Spotify” and how personalized it is to their tastes. Also read: Spotify amps up personalization in biggest global brand campaign since Wrapped The first ads featured photos of Spotify users—some celebs, some not—with lines such as “My Spotify knows me better than my therapist” and “The longest relationship I’ve ever had is with my Spotify.” This second round of ads is similar. The talent this time includes podcasters Emma Chamberlain (“Anything Goes”) and Louis Theroux (“The Louis Theroux Podcast”), musicians Shaboozey and Tinashe, and Dutch soccer star Xavi Simons. All five appear in short videos and static ads talking about how their Spotify reflects their personality. Matt Luhks, senior director of global marketing at Spotify, told Ad Age that “My Spotify” distills the essence of the value users find in the streaming platform’s extensive personalization features—something that the popular year-end “Wrapped” campaigns do as well. “It’s a good example of marketing and product blending together,” he said. “We want to continue to innovate Spotify’s product experience and create the world’s best personalization. It’s not about creating one Spotify experience, it’s about creating 626 million unique Spotify experiences [the number of global users as of July]. ‘My Spotify’ is about how marketing can help create an even deeper relationship between our users and the products.” Spotify is looking at personalization through a wider lens with younger audiences today than previous generations may have had. Younger users simply have a different relationship with genre than older users did at their age, Luhks suggested. “They move more fluidly between genres,” he said. “Different genres reflect different parts of their identity. And sometimes that even changes throughout the day.” This latter insight led to Spotify’s Daylist feature, introduced a year ago this month. Users who search “daylist” in the Spotify app can tap on a customized playlist that changes throughout the day, based on a user’s history of which genres and tracks they prefer during specific dayparts. Many of the new “My Spotify” ads focus on this Daylist feature. “It’s always adapting to your tastes and your habits, and through that, it’s meant to take personalization to this whole new level,” said Luhks. “One pretty cool aspect of this is we’re actually revealing to our users aspects of their musical taste that they may not even have been aware of.” With the talent in the new ads, Spotify aims to show the range, breadth and diversity of Spotify listeners. The talent are also actual Spotify listeners who were willing to open up about their experience. “It wasn’t us writing scripts and asking them to read them back to us,” said Luhks. “We had some prompts, but we wanted to actually hear from them how they use Spotify.” The new ads are rolling out now in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. and will reach other markets soon. Spotify teams around the world are also collecting local “My Spotify” stories for their specific markets. The streamer is using outdoor and social—its longtime platforms of choice—to spread the message. It’s also doing in-app advertising, taking advantage of its own huge built-in media network (though Luhks said the brand has to be careful not to over-message and deteriorate the product experience). Luhks said Spotify will judge the success of the campaign based on adoption of the product features, but also sharing of the marketing assets themselves “My Spotify” has “quickly become one of our most widely shared campaigns,” he said. “We’ve generated over 400,000 shares of the marketing assets with our users. Assets they’re receiving, just like ‘Wrapped,’ we give them the option to share on social. When we see that volume of users sharing marketing assets, that’s a sign we’ve done something right.” More Creativity coverage from Ad Age: Sign up for our daily Creativity newsletter to see the best stories of the day.

Spotify expands ‘My Spotify’ campaign and ‘Daylists’ app feature

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