A SONG FOR EVERY CMO
OVERVIEW
Spotify’s engagement levels are higher than any other medium (+24% over tv and +27% over social) yet digital audio advertising lags far behind other channels, earning under 2% of media spend. The brief was simple: prove that Spotify Advertising captures the complete attention of whatever audience marketers are seeking in order to capture a larger share of marketer attention and media spend.
To kick start conversation amongst key marketing decision makers, we demonstrated Spotify’s laser-targeting capabilities with “A Song For Every CMO” – original songs written about and dedicated to the world’s top CMOs at companies such as Frito-Lay, Kimberly-Clark, Indeed, CVS, General Mills and more. Using Spotify’s data and insight muscle and recorded at Spotify Studios, we tailored each composition to its subject CMO.
The light-hearted stunt drove enormous media and social conversation within the marketing community, inspiring multiple CMOs to reach out, requesting “CMO Songs” of their own.
A potent and differentiated message cleverly brought to life, “A Song For Every CMO” drove immediate and unprecedented results far beyond campaign objectives: 75% year-to-year growth and €1 Billion ad revenue for the first time ever, making 2021 the best year in Spotify Advertising history.
THE INSIGHT
Insight:
Audiences – even our C-level enterprise decision-maker target – are bombarded with messages across multiple screens and their physical surroundings. Advertisements hardly stand a chance of making it through the chaos. And people are very good at avoiding ads: tuning out, scrolling through their social feeds, chatting and multitasking their way past it all.
But that doesn’t apply to audio. As Spotify’s research proves, Spotify users really pay attention.[1] And every Spotify user – all 400 million of them – have seen how data drives personalization on the platform. Could we use data to make targeted ads for a handful of CMOs?
Idea:
We decided to use Spotify to reach our target with a hyper personalized message about the attention-grabbing power of Spotify by using data to create silly-yet-serious tribute songs about key CMOs, hosted for the world to hear exclusively on Spotify itself.
[1] Spotify Sonic Science: Understanding your brain on sound: https://ads.spotify.com/en-US/news-and-insights/sonic-science/
RESULTS
We set out to drive conversation about Spotify Advertising.
Press coverage was widespread and exuberant, with rapturous coverage in mainstream outlets like Wall Street Journal, Axios and The Verge, as well as trade publications like Ad Age, Adweek, PR Week and more. 3.9M+ impressions within five days of launch![1]
Chatter on professional social networks like LinkedIn drove streams, fueled in part by enthusiastic posts from some of our subjects. The #S4ECMO hashtag earned hundreds of likes, shares and comments on LinkedIn in the days following launch.
But we helped business performance too: huge spikes in engagement (10,000 new leads, 185,000 new visitors to the Spotify Advertising website) in Q4 2021. All that interest contributed to Spotify Advertising’s best year yet, with 75% year-to-year growth. Annual sales topped $1.1 billion in revenue for the first time ever.[2]
[1] Spotify Internal “A Song for Every CMO” Campaign Report
[2] Spotify Advertising Internal Data
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Execution
· 14 custom songs
· 14 custom album covers
· 14 custom framed platinum records, sent to CMOs
· 1 mash-up song with album cover
Media
· Spotify platform
· Earned launches
· All songs were released on the Spotify platform. Some are still available on the platform to this day.
Others had to be taken out/replaced for new ones per CMO’s discretion. And 6 new songs are being released late September, 2022.