Spotify Wrapped: What Marketers can Learn From the Viral Campaign

The end of the year is a time of reflection. The time when people buy planners, get gym memberships, and write holiday letters recapping the year. This is the backdrop that makes Spotify Wrapped so successful. Spotify is able to provide users with the soundtrack that got them through the year. For users, Spotify wrapped is another way to share who they are and what they like with their friends and followers while also giving Spotify global viral marketing in exchange. Every year it gets bigger and bigger with massive engagement online. For instance there were 425,000,000 tweets about Spotify wrapped in the first 3 days after the launch this year. Their unique combination of personalization, share-ability, and seasonality is hitting the right spot with their audience. 

What Marketers Can Learn From Spotify Wrapped:

  1. Sharing is caring - Spotify Wrapped is extremely easy to share with friends and on your socials. Creating personalized content that your audience wants to share is a winning strategy. Give your audience a conversation to join and the engagement will follow.

  2. Rinse and repeat - Although Spotify wrapped generally stays the same every year. The annual campaign at the end of the year creates a sense of ritual. Everyone looks forward to when it will be coming out and seeing who their top artists and songs were for the year. Give your audience something to look forward to with ritualized content. 

  3. Join in on the fun - Creating brand specific versions of popular content is a great way to join the conversation. Guinness Beer built out brand specific content using the Wrapped format to engage with their audience.

IMOS Annual Ritual:

Here at IMOS every year around the holidays we create IMOS themed gift boxes. They have become a big hit and those who have received them in the past have always expressed excitement to see what we come up with for the next year. Looking forward we want to try to emulate Spotify Wrapped and create an end of year stylized report with catchy graphics and music to show our performance from the year!