How Spotify Used Big Data For Their Global Outdoor Ad Campaign

For several years, Spotify have rolled out an annual global ad campaign all revolving around the listener data they have amassed thanks to the use of big data analytics.

Spotify highlight the weird and the bizarre user habits from the past year and compile them into a string of cheekily structured ads and effectively use the data to humanise technology.

Examples include:

“Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s Day, what did you do?”

And

“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.”

This year, the ads played on the New Year resolution trope with the clever tag line ‘2018 goals.’

But how does Spotify generate these listener habits and data?

Spotify use the number of times people listen to a certain song, the names of playlists, popular songs in various geographical regions as well as much much more.

There is no doubt that Spotify amass a huge amount of data from us, the listeners, therefore meaning that a lot of work has to be done before they get to the stage of finding the data gems.

In an interview with Adweek, Spotify’s CMO Seth Farbman stated that they have a ridiculous amount of data, which can become overwhelming, however thanks to the analysts at Spotify, finding data points and trends that would make fun headlines came from simply recognising what cultural stories were important to the public in that year and finding the data to validate it.

However, a few users have highlighted their outrage at the fact that Spotify have not only been ‘spying’ on their users, but also taking the liberty of mocking them on a global stage.

Marketing Executives at Spotify have since highlighted that the music app uses listener data in more than just their ad campaigns. Big data is engrained in many of the features you use everyday, such as the Discover Weekly, and the Daily Mix suggestions. Also permission was sought when ads containing playlist names were curated.

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