When you think of Spotify, what comes to mind? Music? Podcasts? It’s safe to say it’s not video.

To prove that Spotify offers multiformat ad opportunities and bring our video capabilities to life, we hacked the most mind-numbing part of the media planning experience: the RFP spreadsheet.

Spreadbeats is the world’s very first spreadsheet music video — made and played entirely in Microsoft Excel. It’s an unprecedented feat in brand storytelling, an 8-bit wonder of style and substance, a true labor of love, R&D, and coding prowess. And the best part? It’s an actual media plan spreadsheet.

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 that 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.

We managed to code the whole music video in one single Excel file of 10MB. Ironically, to do something this advanced, we had to take a trip back to the origins of data and algorithms. We used old compression methods and visualization techniques that hadn’t been used for many, many years, all in the spirit of economy. We transformed Excel built-in functions like ASCII, Graphs, Unicode, and conditional formatting into cutting-edge visualization methods. No AI was used, just human ingenuity and a lot of love. But all technology means nothing without an emotional connection and a story: We told the story of E7 — born in a rational world of numbers and data, where everything makes sense, but where something is missing.

So one day she wakes up, and explores different visual worlds, on a journey to find herself and belong, taking on increasingly complex and beautiful forms along the way.