Billboards & OOH · Global · 2016
Spotify: Thanks 2016, It’s Been Weird
Spotify mined anonymised listening behaviour for funny, specific truths and put them on billboards.
By Maer Media editorial teamPublished 4 October 20263 min readSpotify in-houseCampaigns · Market & Growth · Branding
- Brand
- Spotify
- Market
- Global
- Year
- 2016
- Category
- Billboards & OOH
- Agency or team
- Spotify in-house
- Channels
- Billboards, transit, print
The context
Streaming services looked interchangeable. Spotify wanted to show personality, and prove it understood its listeners better than anyone.
Anonymised listening behaviour reveals funny, very human truths.
The move
The in-house team wrote headlines from aggregate data, such as the listener who streamed a breakup song dozens of times on Valentine’s Day, and ran them on outdoor sites in several markets during the year-end season.
How it was executed
- Mined aggregate data for odd, specific patterns.
- Wrote short, witty headlines around them.
- Ran them in major cities through the year-end season.
Spotify mined anonymised listening behaviour for funny, specific truths and put them on billboards.
What happened Reported facts
The campaign became a template for data-driven outdoor advertising and the outdoor counterpart to Wrapped. It was widely covered by the trade press and repeated in later years.
Why it worked Maer’s analysis
Specific behaviour felt personal without identifying anyone, and humour made a tech company feel human.
What to take from it Maer’s analysis
- 01Specific beats clever: real behaviour makes the joke land.
- 02Use data with care: aggregate and anonymise it.
- 03Outdoor can be personal when the insight is.
Brands with large datasets can turn aggregate behaviour into outdoor humour, with strict anonymisation and care under India’s DPDP Act.
Where Maer applies this
The same thinking runs through these brand templates:
Sources: Spotify (2016); Adweek coverage. Figures are as publicly reported; Maer Media was not involved in this work and is not affiliated with Spotify.
The Maer Media editorial team studies how brands are built, from positioning and packaging to launches and growth. Figures in each case study come from the public sources listed above; the analysis and the India notes are our own. More about Maer
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