Spotify Unearths More Hilarious User Habits in Global Outdoor Ads for the Holidays

Ready to make some early New Year’s resolutions? Of course you’re not. But Spotify has some fun suggestions regardless, based on the amusingly peculiar habits of its user base.

The streaming music service’s new global out-of-home campaign for the holidays uses the same basic approach as last year—billboards with snappy headlines based around fun tidbits of user data. This year’s tweak is that the campaign is positioned as “2018 goals,” with the ads highlighting #winning behavior from 2017 that should serve you well in 2018.

For example, the ad at the top of this story will run globally. The headline reads, “Take a page from the 3,445 people who streamed the ‘Boozy Brunch’ playlist on a Wednesday this year.”

The campaign includes a handful of politically themed boards running in the U.S. None of them mention President Trump, but they do have some fun with some of his lieutenants, including two who notably fell from grace:

The ads running globally go for broader humor, including an amusingly dark execution about medical professionals.

The campaign also includes life-size cutouts in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, featuring artists including Cardi B and Bruno Mars, into which passersby will be able to stick their heads for a photo.

Those installations will go up in early December. (Spotify enlisted 70 artists around the world for the campaign.)

The work was made in-house. Like the first round of ads last year, the campaign remains one of the most delightful deployments of user data in advertising today. The ads exude a feeling of joy, even in difficult times, and capture the wonderful quirks of its users—who clearly dig deep into the service and make it an everyday part of their lives.

CREDITS
Chief Marketing Officer: Seth Farbman
VP, Brand and Creative: Jackie Jantos
Global Brand Director: Alexandra Tanguay
Global Creative Director: Alex Bodman
Associate Creative Director: Dan Brill
Associate Creative Director: Spencer Hansen
Global Brand Design Director: Rasmus Wangelin
Senior Art Director: Martin Berggren, Ellen Pai, Angeline Toh, Erik Herrstrom
Associate Brand Director: Christian Navarro
Senior Global Brand Manager: Payman Kassaie, Lindsay Fischler, Candice Greenberg, Lauren Solomon, Christine Andren, Jonathan Chu
Associate Brand Manager: Kristy Lyons, Christine Motch
Director, Integrated Production: Belinda Lopez
Senior Producers: Davis Najdecki, Alice Tam
Production Coordinator: Kenzie Tankersley, Jeong Park
Global Director, Brand Strategy: Zach Pentel
Brand Strategy Manager: Nathan Doiev
Head of Marketing Strategy & Planning: Neal Gorevic
Global Consumer Marketing: Krista Scozzari, Antonia Moreland
Head of Global Media: Scott Marsden
Global Media Manager: Kathryn Griffin
Data Program Manager: Sara Kayden
Data Science: Gordon Silvera, Gabriel Duncan

Tim Nudd

@nudd

Tim Nudd is a former creative editor of Adweek.