How Spotify’s video ads became a game-changing must-buy for media agencies
Winning Gold in the B2B category at The Drum Awards for Digital Experience is Spotify’s ‘Spreadbeats.’ Here is the award-winning case study from agency FCB New York.
FCB worked with Spotify’s ad sales teams to create custom RFPs
Imagine you’re a media planner. Your job depends on your ability to show ROI, so it’s no wonder that when it comes to RFPing, you prioritize efficient go-tos such as Meta and Google, old reliables such as YouTube and shiny objects such as TikTok. Spotify just seems like another digital audio platform and an expensive one at that – not exactly a must-buy.
But the thing is, Spotify is so much more than an audio platform. It has video and multiformat ads… it’s interactive and engaging and its ROI goes way beyond numbers on a spreadsheet.
To break through, we had to find a way to hack the RFP process and change the conversation… showing media planners and the entire marketing industry why Spotify Advertising goes beyond just plain digital audio.
Objectives
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Increase familiarity beyond audio
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Drive relevance, consideration and brand love
So, to win over media planners, we brought Spotify’s video ad capabilities and its ROI superiority to the place where they spend the most time considering ad buys: their media plan spreadsheets. Spreadbeats. A never-been-done-before, eye- and ear-opening way to prove the power of combining video and audio in a medium perfectly tailored to its audience. We partnered with Coachella-headlining artist John Summit and coded a four-minute music video into the actual spreadsheets Spotify’s salesforce sends to its clients, turning rows and columns into a canvas that sprang to life when the file was opened.
We worked with Spotify’s ad sales teams to create custom RFPs for every brand that had requested one, so that when they received their actual detailed RFP responses, they’d also receive an adjacent music video surprise.
With no paid media, Spotify sales reps individually emailed media planners their RFP responses, including a coy message of what they were about to see. Then, once they opened it, the RFP sprang to life.
Spotify salespeople used a Spreadbeats generator. With the generator, they could customize music videos for each recipient by inputting their name, the brand they represent, and other relevant details.
They could seamlessly deliver their real RFP response spreadsheets alongside the music video by uploading them. After clicking “generate,” they would receive a straightforward Excel file containing their RFP response spreadsheet along with the customized music video.
By breaking the boundaries of video and B2B marketing, we proved that Spotify’s video ads are a game-changing must-buy for media agencies and brands everywhere.
Ready to get your work recognized on a global stage? Enter The Drum Awards today. Need more inspiration, check out more winning Awards Case Studies.