How Spotify won over media planners using... Excel spreadsheets

Spotify, on the other hand, doesn’t come to mind as a tried-and-true video ad platform. Media planners think of it as a 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 visual ads… it’s interactive, collaborative and highly 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

- Increase perception of Spotify as a video + audio platform

- Drive relevance, consideration, and brand love in a distinctly Spotify way

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 a tab in the actual Excel 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 who’d 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.

The Spotify team were given a Spreadbeats generator, where they could customize music videos for each recipient by inputting their name, the brand they represent, and other relevant details about their ad client.

By uploading their actual media plan response, the Spreadbeats generator would deliver a new Excel file containing two tabs: the first, containing a customized Spreadbeats music video and the second containing their media plan proposal.

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.

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