Millennials tend to be pretty unmotivated when it comes to DIY projects. But that began changing early in the pandemic. Our client, Behr Paint, wanted to capitalize on this momentum, inspiring more millennials to paint while growing purchase intent for Behr.

Once people do decide to paint, choosing a color is one of the most difficult challenges they face. There’s even a term for it: “color paralysis.” Our goal was to align color choice with a millennial passion point – music – thus imbuing it with meaning and kickstarting their painting journey with Behr.

What if you could discover color by listening to your favorite songs? Drawing inspiration from a phenomenon called “chromesthesia,” where people see color when they hear music, we partnered with Katy Perry to create a unique Behr paint palette based on the colors she experiences when she listens to and creates music. We then worked with Spotify to bring it to life, via our Music in Color microsite. Our algorithm analyzes songs in the Spotify library for tempo and other musical attributes, assigns colors from Katy’s palette as they play, then lands on a dominant color, based on key. Users are then a click away from purchasing that paint color for their walls.

It takes, on average, about 108 days for most DIYers to settle on a paint color for their project. On the flip side, we saw that millennials spend 2+ hours a day listening to music on Spotify. We wanted to connect these two behaviors, and let music be a way to make the color-choosing process easier and more meaningful.

So we built an algorithm that analyzes all the songs on Spotify and connects them to color. The algorithm scans each song in the Spotify library for tempo and 7 other musical attributes, assigns colors from a unique palette as they play (the palette was created in partnership with pop star Katy Perry, based on the colors she experiences when she creates music), then lands on a dominant color, based on key. Users are then a click away from purchasing that paint color for their walls.

Music in Color is a brand activation in partnership with Spotify that gave every song in the Spotify song library – all 70 million of them – a color. Our algorithm analyzed each song based on 8 musical attributes (tempo, key, valence, danceability, energy, instrumental-ness, loudness and acoustic-ness), assigned corresponding colors from a unique palette as the song played, then landed on a dominant color based on key. People could simply jump around to their favorite songs and get inspired to paint.

We collaborated with Katy Perry to launch the microsite, reaching hundreds of millions of millennials and giving them the power to discover color in a whole new way.

We also gave millennials the ability to experience Behr colors on their walls, by way of our custom “Music in Color” AR filters on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.

The campaign debuted September 23 and will ultimately run for 9 months.

We far surpassed our primary campaign goal. According to a Kantar study, millennial purchase intent of Behr rose by 7.8 percentage points, while unaided brand awareness rose 9.2 percentage points. Average time spent on the Music In Color/Spotify microsite was more than 2 ½ minutes – 5x the Spotify average – with over 173k microsite uses. 34% of users went directly to Behr’s online sales platform, BehrExpress.com, where Behr saw a conversion rate increase of 296% – a 13% increase in online revenue vs. the previous time frame.

The project was picked up by both industry and mainstream media, with articles in Billboard, People, Architectural Digest and more, and generated over 800 million media impressions.

As a direct result of the project, the 10-year old Katy Perry song we used to promote the project – “Teenage Dream” – re-entered the Billboard charts.