Shape of you / Most campaigns aim for as large a reach as possible. But focusing its creative effort on only 14 people worked best for the Spotify’s purposes. By working with only a select group of CMOs, the brand was able to demonstrate the depth of its cultural insight. It also helped highlight Spotify Advertising’s strength: its ability to hyper-target.
Spotify has shown itself in the past to be adept at packaging its listener data in an entertaining way to connect with its audience. For example, the platform’s users wait eagerly to see their ‘Spotify Wrapped’ every December. Launched in 2016, this feature presents data about each listener’s platform habits at the end of each year, creating something personal and shareable.
No more boring B2B / Spotify Advertising’s ambition was to connect with busy creatives on a deeper level, celebrate its existing partners and establish a relationship with new ones. And the brand did just that by creating something that surprised and delighted. B2B advertising has a reputation for not being as creative as B2C. As the jury president and CCO of Doremus, Paul Hirsch, said at this year’s Cannes Lions festival, speaking about the trailblazing Sherwin-Williams’ campaign Speaking in Color’, ‘B2B often follows in the wake of B2C in many ways – whether it’s ideas or trends.’ But who says B2B marketing has to be boring?
Here, Spotify stood out with a campaign that was entertaining and by virtue of being personalised, hard to ignore. What’s more, the initiative was made for social media sharing, allowing the campaign to spread to each influential person’s equally influential networks.
Give it away now / Creating an effort-intensive, hyper-personalised gift for (prospective) clients not only commands attention. It also invokes the reciprocity bias – a feeling of obligation to return a favour. The tactic is widely used in B2C marketing: it’s the logic behind giveaways and free samples. There’s no reason it can’t be as impactful in the B2B space. Businesspeople are people too after all.
The strategy calls to mind Google Cloud’s Biography of Tomorrow, which aimed to convince French businesses of the benefits of its predictive capabilities by delivering personalised biographies to 10 leading executives. At the time of writing, two of these executives had struck deals with Google Cloud, a testament to the effectiveness of applying a little bit of social pressure.
