PMM Interview Question: What's Your Favorite Marketing Campaign?

Approach

Do some research on marketing campaigns of companies you’re interested in, or simply start off by searching for top marketing campaigns in recent years. Once you choose a campaign, find the brand’s positioning or mission statement and have data points on hand that showcase why the campaign was successful. Lastly, show excitement! If it’s your favorite campaign it should show!

For me, I loved Spotify’s “Wrapped” campaign, so that was easy for me to choose. Next, I found background research to find Spotify’s Brand Positioning (Found on Spotify Website):

With Spotify, it’s easy to find the right music or podcast for every moment – on your phone, your computer, your tablet and more. There are millions of tracks and episodes on Spotify. So whether you’re behind the wheel, working out, partying or relaxing, the right music or podcast is always at your fingertips. Choose what you want to listen to, or let Spotify surprise you. You can also browse through the collections of friends, artists, and celebrities, or create a radio station and just sit back. Soundtrack your life with Spotify. Subscribe or listen for free.

Then, I read a lot of articles about the campaign and found datapoints showcasing its success, like this one from Forbes.

Our Answer

My favorite campaign right now is Spotify’s “Wrapped” 2019.

In Spotify’s “Wrapped” campaign, the company released the top artists, songs, albums, and podcasts of the year, both for the global Spotify listener audience and for each individual user. Spotify also released its “Playlist of the Decade”, the top streamed songs of the past 10 years that all users could listen to in the app. The campaign launched in 21 markets. In NYC, where I was at the time, Spotify took over Penn Station with hilarious statistics gathered from listener data! These global stats were also shared throughout Spotify’s social media channels using fun, Spotify branded, animations.

For individual users, they received customized playlists and listening stats for the year, including top songs, artists, and even how many minutes they spent listening to music. Users could then share these stats with friends on their social media pages. This provided a fun way to explore your music trends and to share them with friends! For me, it was a great way for friends to make fun of me because Ariana Grande was my favorite artist of the year (of which I am NOT ashamed).

Overall, the campaign was a huge success. Spotify reported that millions of users shared their listening history over social media sites. This allowed Spotify to get in front of many of their user’s friends for free! In addition, their Wrapped playlist was streamed over 3 billion times by more than 60 million users. Anecdotally, I saw the campaign broadcasted in both traditional and digital media, and also saw a lot of my friends post their stats on their instagram stories.

Follow-up question: What do you think the campaign’s objectives were?

Given that Spotify positions itself around having the right music at your fingertips, I believe the first objective was to demonstrate Spotify’s data-driven algorithms that are capable of finding the right songs for each individual user. By having users share their individual stats, Spotify exemplified the vast variety of content on the platform, and the app’s deep integration into customers’ everyday lives.

The other objectives were related to customer acquisition and retention. Having customized statistics entices new users to use the product in order to get their own stats, while Spotify’s global statistics showcase the robust content available on the platform. Longer term, I believe the campaign increases retention, because Spotify users become delighted by the surprise feature, while simultaneously becoming aware of how integrated the app is in their everyday lives.