This campaign used data relating to individual music listening habits as the central creative idea. By doing a data audit first and using it to shape the creative executions, we were we able to create a memorable and lasting connection with our audience. Marshall McLuhan famously declared the medium is the message; thanks to the power of our data we were able to dynamically transform our message into individually targeted pieces of music that wouldn’t interrupt the streaming experience.

The new Toyota Aygo was launched across Europe in 2018 with the campaign line ‘Just Go’, enshrining the spirit of spontaneity inspired by Toyota’s smallest, most affordable car. In the UK, the target audience of 18-34 year olds is hard to reach using TV and posters, but we discovered them to be conspicuous streamers of music, using the likes of Spotify for long periods, at all times and in different circumstances to provide the soundtrack to their day.

Using Spotify’s unique musical data and the power of dynamic creative, we created bespoke Aygo ads that responded to each listeners’ musical diversity. Rather than interpret the listening habits of the data directly in these commercials, we created music in different genres to carry the same information. In keeping with the campaign, the music was written and recorded with a sense of fun, but this was also an important way to avoid being heavy handed and ‘creepy’ in our use of listeners’ data, this age group being particularly aware of privacy issues. The creative itself worked like this:

If the listener already displayed the spontaneous attitude to music that we were championing with our Aygo campaign, we celebrated this with a medley of comically diverse genres and offered a reward.

If they were stuck in a rut, listening to one particular genre to the exclusion of all others, we served them ads that aped their favourite genre and diplomatically offered them tickets for a gig that would take them outside their comfort zone.

To best understand the audience, we performed an initial audit of listening habits of our target audience. This demonstrated that our 18-34 year olds almost exclusively listen to five key genres: Pop, dance, hip-hop, R’n’B and rock.

Working alongside the analysts at Spotify, we could see that many of these users rarely listened to music outside one of their preferred genres. These listeners were categorised as ‘non-diverse’ and could be sub-divided by their primary genre. This meant we could create bespoke creative for each these audiences, encouraging them to be more adventurous.

We could see another key audience: those who were already listening to different genres on different occasions. We categorised these as ‘diverse’ and created a separate piece of creative that celebrated this sense of adventure.

With our sub-categorisation already in place and inspiring the creative from the very beginning, targeting was a matter of serving the relevant piece of creative to listeners based on their musical DNA analysis.

This was an exercise in combining digital and analogue resources, with the creative team working with the media strategists, then with Spotify and agency data analysts and finally with various composition and musical talents to create a truly smart application of the Toyota Aygo campaign theme.

Combining Spotify data with bespoke music compositions, then providing relevant and personal feedback and rewards, this campaign exemplifies the power of combining data analysis with creative strategy and music craft in prompting direct interaction with the brand.

By engaging the audience without distracting, they repaid us by noticing and responding to our spontaneity message. We had over 90,000 visits to the campaign hub, and just under 3000 playlists were created with unaided awareness increasing by 50% and spontaneous ad recall by over 200%.

Word-of-mouth increased 36% by the end of the campaign and there was 205% spontaneous ad recall.