Spreadbeats

Background: When you think of Spotify ads, what comes to mind? Ads in between songs? During podcasts? It’s safe to say that video ads aren’t your first thought. And that has consequences for our ad revenue. Media planners bucket us as an audio-only platform, an incremental element in the larger media plan. Creative Idea: 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. We created Spreadbeats. An 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 Excel spreadsheets Spotify’s salesforce sends to its clients. Millions of data points transformed into a stunning music video, turning rows and columns into a canvas that sprang to life when the file was opened. That’s right. Every music video contained a functioning RFP mediaplan. For the first time ever, we used Excel as an audio player. We stored the whole track, all as simple numbers and characters, in a spreadsheet. And we built a custom algorithm to sync it to the visuals. Insights & Strategy: 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. Objectives: Increase familiarity of our multi-format ad offering Drive relevance, consideration, and brand love Execution: For the first time ever, we used Excel as an audio player. We stored the whole track, all as simple numbers and characters, in a spreadsheet. And we built a custom algorithm to sync it to visuals. We coded 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. This was digital archeology. We didn’t just upload an existing music video into Excel, essentially using Excel as a media player. We built the whole music video from scratch in Excel, using built-in Excel functions like ASCII, Graphs, Unicode, and conditional formatting. We turned the very same functions media planners use every day 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. To integrate the music video in their RFP media plans, Spotify salespeople could use 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 spreadsheet RFP responses alongside the music video by uploading them. People would receive a straightforward Excel file containing their RFP response along with the customized music video. Results: Spotify sought to grow ad revenue by challenging advertisers’ perception of the platform as audio- only. With video consumption on Spotify rising, we spotlighted our video ad offerings in a bold, unorthodox way. Leveraging our playful brand nature, we disrupted planners’ routines by running an ad on THEIR favorite platform—Excel spreadsheets. But we didn’t stop there: we created a music video that viscerally entertained, engaged, and delivered our message. The results? A 17:1 ROI, +5650% more email forwards than B2B average, and +870% ad engagement compared to our previous paid campaign, proving Spotify’s video ads are as compelling as the platform itself.