Context:

Every year, people wait in anticipation for Spotify to announce the most streamed artist of the year. But in 2023, Taylor Swift was such a dominant force, everyone already knew she was going to be the winner. How do you announce something everyone already knows? By not announcing it all. Instead, we gamified the news and mobilized an army of Swifties across 16 time zones to piece it together.

Objectives:

-Become the brand that understands fandom

-Drive social conversation among our GenZ target audience

-Get more than 150 million users to engage / complete their own Spotify Wrapped

-Increase engagement in new and growth markets including LATAM and India

-Drive target audience to the Spotify app / platform

Every year, people wait in anticipation for Spotify to announce the Global Top Artist of the Year. But in 2023, Taylor Swift had such a dominant year, everyone already knew she was going to be the winner.

How do you announce something everyone already knows? By not announcing it all.

Instead we created an OOH campaign turned social game for Swifties around the world.

We mobilized an army that worked together across social on X, shared docs and live TikTok sessions, some with 300,000+ live participants. In the end, the fans revealed our announcement for us.

The authenticity of this work to Swifties demonstrated the power of a brand behaving not like a giant corporation, but a fan. It connected with Swifties on a personal level, engaged their curiosity and creativity and gave them a role in crowning Swift's achievement.

This wasn't marketing, it was a gift to the fans.

The strategy for this campaign was to speak authentically to the Swiftie fandom and actively engage them to work together as a community.

Knowing they obsess over Swift's every move and share clues and theories on social, we left a trail of Easter eggs around Swift's symbology and lore from them to uncover. But not any clues. Really challenging clues that we knew would take a collective force of hundreds of thousands to decipher.

We decided to use every global media placement as a puzzle piece. First, we launched with cryptic billboards across 11 countries in markets with Swift’s top streaming numbers. Then we employed Spotify's global social handles to quietly share clues, and even buried puzzle pieces on the Spotify platform for Swift's communities to discover.

How do you bring to life the entirety of the Swiftiverse?

First we created an intricate tableau of Swift atop a mountain of Easter Eggs. The piece features 100+ references from Swift's entire catalog and viral moments from her Eras tour in 2023.

Then we split this key visual into pieces and scattered it around the world, across our different media placements in 11 countries where Swift has top streaming numbers. We also quietly shared pieces on Spotify social channels and hidden on Spotify platform.

Once Swifties solved the puzzle, we rewarded them by going deeper in film that brought the mountain of Easter Eggs to life. It was posted by Taylor and so embraced by Swifties they thought it came from the artist herself.

The Internet turned our puzzle into memes, merch, even a physical puzzle (illegally) for sale online.

The campaign ran for 6 weeks starting on 11/23.

What started as just the Global Top Artist of the Year announcement, became the cornerstone of Spotify's end of year 2023 Wrapped campaign. On its own, it accounted for 71% of all cross-channel engagements and 90% of video views.

The campaign as a whole had 20,000+ news mentions and 15.8+ billion in estimated reach. The hashtags generated 70.8 billion views on TikTok and became a #1 trending topic globally on X.

This helped drive traffic to the app experience, with a total of 215.8 million individual "Wrapped"s created, up 40% from 2022. And it amounted to an increase in engagement with GenZ by 60%.

Around the world, there was a double-digit uptick in engagement with Wrapped. In LATAM, engagement actually doubled.

All contributing to a strong Q4, helping grow active monthly users 23% to 602 million, making it the second largest Q4 net addition performance in Spotify history.