Spotify coded music videos into spreadsheet to attract media planners. It worked
Winning Gold at The Drum Awards for Design in Technical Achievement is FCB NY and Spotify with Spreadbets. Here is the award-winning case study.
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 like Meta and Google, old reliables like YouTube, and shiny objects like TikTok. Spotify just seems like 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 video and multiformat 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.
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Objectives: Increase familiarity beyond audio; and drive relevance, consideration, and brand love.
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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 managed to code the whole music video in one single Excel file of 10MB. Ironically, to do something this advanced, we had to take a trip back to the origins of data and algorithms. We used old compression methods and visualization techniques that hadn’t been used for many, many years, all in the spirit of economy. We transformed Excel built-in functions like ASCII, Graphs, Unicode, and conditional formatting into cutting-edge visualization methods. No AI was used, just human ingenuity and a lot of love. But all technology means nothing without an emotional connection and a story: We told the story of E7 — born in a rational world of numbers and data, where everything makes sense, but where something is missing. So one day, she wakes up and explores different visual worlds, on a journey to find herself and belong, taking on increasingly complex and beautiful forms along the way.
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By breaking the boundaries of music videos and media planning, we proved that Spotify’s video ads are a game-changing must-buy for media agencies and brands everywhere.
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