Once an iconic brand, Barilla had lost its meaningfulness to consumers in recent years and was under the risk of going from top choice to mainstream commodity.

In 2021, as part of the effort to the new brand platform launch, Barilla wanted to create deeper emotional connections with consumers providing a useful and innovative service to turn a moment of everyday life with its key product, pasta, into a moment of entertainment.

The perfect opportunity came during the 2020 pandemic which has forced millions of people to cook at home everyday.

Pasta quickly became a staple meal during lockdown, seeing a 50% increase around "how long to cook pasta for" searches worldwide since Jan 2020.

It seems like one of the simplest meals to cook, but it’s not.

Cooking a good “al dente” pasta is almost impossible if you don’t pay attention to the exact cooking time.

Pasta quickly became a staple meal during lockdown, seeing a 50% increase around "how long to cook pasta for" searches worldwide since Jan 2020.

It seems like one of the simplest meals to cook, but it’s not.

To help people reach the right cooking, Barilla teamed up with Spotify to create Playlist Timer: the first pasta timer on Spotify. The project is composed of a series of playlists whose length corresponds to the perfect ‘al dente’ cooking time of different pasta shapes.

Little did we know - 2020 forced millions of people to cook at home every day.

Despite that, cooking a perfect “al dente” pasta is still pretty difficult.

After seeing a 50% increase around "how long to cook pasta for" searches worldwide since January 2020, we identified an opportunity to help people cook with Barilla.

Barilla wanted to talk to a broad audience, but with a key focus on GenZ and Millennials.

The objective was to create deeper emotional connections with consumers providing a useful and innovative service to turn a moment of everyday life with its key product, pasta, into a moment of entertainment.

The strategy looked to tap into 3 key insights to connect with the audience in a genuine way:

- GenZ and Millennials often listen to music while cooking

- They do so predominantly using Spotify

- They discover new things through social media

We started from an old habit, listening to music while cooking, and turned it into our solution.

To help people reach the right cooking, Barilla teamed up with Spotify to create Playlist Timer: the first pasta timer on Spotify.

The project is composed by a series of playlists whose length corresponds to the cooking time of different pasta shapes.

Each playlist combines data of the most popular music genres with people’s favorite pasta shapes, a data driven approach that allows Barilla to target each user with a music selection that fully reflects their taste.

The playlists can also be launched with virtual assistants or directly from Barilla’s pasta pack scanning a QR code.

Barilla Playlist Timer received global coverage, recording over 1.1 billion of PR global reach in the first two weeks after launch, with more than 400 articles published worldwide and quotes on international TVs and Radios.

The campaign generated more than 2M of organic interactions on Social Media (Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Reddit).

Since Playlist Timer’s launch, Barilla’s perceived brand innovation has grown by 89%.

The project became a global trend topic and projected Barilla into the number 1 Food Brand on Spotify, with over 142.000 followers and still growing (data from 16th of March 2021).

More importantly, over 508.000 minutes of music were streamed, meaning more than 140,000 pasta dishes had been prepared using the Barilla Playlist Timer (data from 16th of March 2021).