How Spotify used the power of music to persuade CMOs to spend with it
FCB and Spotify won at The Drum Awards for B2B 2022 in the Best Digital Campaign and Most Innovative or Creative Use of Content category for its ‘A song for every CMO’ campaign. Here, we find out what went into this successful work.
FCB's work for Spotify helped to boost its ad business
Spotify wanted to capture a greater slice of the digital audio ad market. FCB came up with an ingenious solution to put the platform front-of-mind for chief marketing officers (CMOs) considering their media mix.
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The brief
Spotify’s engagement levels are reportedly higher than those of any other medium. But digital audio advertising lags far behind other channels, earning under 2% of media spend. While Spotify Advertising has been massively successful, earning $745m in revenue in 2020, there remained huge growth potential if the business could convince B2B targets to rebalance their media priorities and prioritize digital audio alongside TV, digital, and social.
Unsurprisingly, Spotify Advertising had tons of data to support this argument. Its proprietary Sonic Science study proved that digital audio advertising outperforms TV, digital and conventional radio on critical metrics like engagement and brand breakthrough, as well as recall and emotional resonance. If the company could play to the emotions of its customer base, it might have more success.
With that problem in mind, the brief was simple: prove that Spotify Advertising captures the complete attention of whatever audience marketers are seeking, to capture a larger share of marketers' attention and media spend.
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The idea
Given Spotify’s massive popularity, FCB’s team knew that the CMO audience used the platform to play favorite songs, discover new music, and consume podcasts. The agency decided to use Spotify itself to reach CMO targets with hyper-personalized messages.
FCB 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 and General Mills. Using Spotify’s data and insight muscle and recorded at Spotify Studios, FCB tailored each composition to its subject CMO.
The light-hearted compositions, the pop-cultural appeal of their musical backdrops and the made-for-sharing stories of deploying Spotify’s user data and platform turbo-charged engagement. The campaign also generated conversation in the trade press and on social platforms like LinkedIn. Several CMOs even reached out to request the songwriting treatment for themselves.
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The results
Chatter on platforms like LinkedIn drove streams, fueled in part by enthusiastic posts from CMOs. The #S4ECMO hashtag earned hundreds of likes, shares, and comments on LinkedIn in the days following the launch. Press coverage was widespread, with write-ups in mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Axios and The Verge and publications like The Drum, Ad Age, AdWeek, MediaPost, Muse By Clio and PR Week.
The months following release saw huge spikes in engagement including new business conversations with 10,000 marketing leaders and 185,000 new visitors to the Spotify Advertising website in Q4 2021.
This campaign was a winner at The Drum Awards for B2B 2022. You can see all the winners here. The Drum Awards for Marketing are currently open for entry. Find out how you can enter now.