Spreadbeats is an unprecedented feat of data-enhanced creativity; with 25 million data points and one full year of technical development, Spotify Advertising created the world’s first-ever music video in Microsoft Excel, reaching media planners directly in their RFP spreadsheets and proving the power of our video ad units.

This couldn’t be more quintessentially Spotify.

Our very business model is predicated upon using data to entertain its audience. No difference here. We took perhaps the most rational and data-heavy platform known to humankind — Excel — and transformed that data into a moving experience.

Media planning happens year-round around the world, but spring is by far the most influential time in the industry. Between Upfronts, NewFronts, and, of course, Cannes, the marketing industry is buzzing about new and exciting media opportunities, with everyone looking for ways to add an X factor to their quarterly media plans and gathering inspiration for their annual plans in the fall.

To gain media planners’ attention and budgets, brands go big. Events. Conferences. The full- court press is on. Of course, Spotify Advertising plays the game too. But the noise of the latest “this” and promises of “that” can be overwhelming for a media planner.

Even for Spotify, it can be hard to be heard. Cool new audio features like Daylist and Remix may get buzz, but we wanted to make sure our video and multiformat ads got their fair share of the attention. So this year, Spotify decided to do something different.

We partnered with rising Spotify musician John Summit – just as he’s releasing “Shiver” and riding the buzz of his recent Coachella set — to reimagine a forgotten genre... the music video. Together, we used our music and audio heritage to catapult into a new era where Spotify Advertising could be known for video ads too.

Imagine you’re a media planner. Your job depends on your ability to show ROI. So it’s no wonder when it comes to RFPing, you prioritize efficient go-tos like Meta and Google, old reliables like YouTube, and shiny objects like TikTok. Spotify just seems like another digital audio platform, and an expensive one at that. Not exactly a must-buy.

But the thing is, Spotify is so much more than an audio platform. It has video and multiformat ads… it’s interactive and engaging, and its ROI goes way beyond numbers on a spreadsheet.

To break through, we had to find a way to hack the RFP process and change the conversation… showing media planners and the entire marketing industry why Spotify Advertising goes beyond just plain digital audio.

Objectives:

Improve ROI perception

Increase familiarity beyond audio

Drive relevance, consideration, and brand love

In 2023, Spotify launched new video ad units. But there’s a problem: Media planners and advertisers still consider us as just an audio platform. And audio only commands 2% of their ad spend. As a result, when reaching out for proposals, they often request media plans tailored exclusively for audio ads. So, to win over media planners, we brought Spotify’s video ad capabilities and its ROI superiority to the place where they spend the most time considering ad buys: their Media Plan spreadsheets. Spreadbeats. A never-been-done-before, eye- and ear-opening way to prove the power of combining video and audio in a medium perfectly tailored to its audience. We partnered with Coachella-headlining artist John Summit and coded a four-minute music video into the actual spreadsheets Spotify’s salesforce sends to its clients, turning rows and columns into a canvas that sprang to life when the file was opened.

At CES, Horizon Media’s founder, Bill Koenigsberg, said, “I don’t know what Spotify Advertising is supposed to do for me.” He summed up what 66% of media planners felt: Spotify ads had no unique benefit.

So without fully knowing what Spotify Advertising offers, many media planners simply assumed that we were an audio-only platform. And they only spent 2% of their budgets on audio ads.

But Spotify Advertising offers so much more at every step of the marketing funnel than audio ads- our video ads actually yield better ROI than other advertising platforms’ video ads.

So we set out to make it crystal clear that not only does Spotify offer video ads; those video ads work harder for your media plan.

The clearest way to prove our video bona fides?

Put our video ad effectiveness data front-and-center when media planners were crunching numbers for their media plans: the RFP process.

We used Spotify’s sales lead data to make each spreadsheet feel bespoke to each media planner.

The sales team’s CRM database gave us insight into which brands each media planner worked on, the depth of their relationship with Spotify, their media objectives, and more.

With these factors in mind, we customized each spreadsheet to make the music video feel hyper-targeted and personalized: It contained the media planner’s name, their client’s brand, the specific Spotify audience data they had been seeking, and more.

And our data prowess didn’t stop there. We turned each cell in each spreadsheet into a moving visual by coding it as an individual data point corresponding with a given visual. Cell E35 would correspond with a green block, cell C26 would correspond with a blue block, and so on.

From the targeting, to the message, to the actual transformation into a music video, data informed everything.

By turning media planners’ main work platform into an entertainment experience, we achieved exactly what we set out to do, both internally and externally. Internally, we gave our Spotify sales team the ultimate tool to start a conversation about Spotify’s unique value with an audience of media planners. And in an industry that is known to persuade with numbers and data, it managed to convince potential clients on an emotional level, ensuring breakthrough in a sea of sameness of percentages and raw data. The media planner audience is highly receptive to a strong creative idea, and Spreadbeats is an idea that spoke to their hearts as well as their minds.