Spotify & the king of growth marketing: Mayur Gupta

Spotify recently launched their 2018 holiday campaign “Wrapped”. The concept, which launched a few years ago, takes most played tracks from 12:01 AM on January 1 to 12:00 AM Dec 31 and puts them into one awesome playlist.

For anyone passionate about music, the concept is spectacularly simple, and a delightful uber-personalized early holiday present!

At the 2018 Wrapped launch party in New York City, guests were delighted with data-driven details. At the coat check, they were handed a card highlighting coat check-themed songs and playlists. They left with jars of Holiday Jam, which, you guessed it, were personalized with that attendee’s favorite songs (jams) of 2018!

Taking insights to the streets

Spotify, like many of the brands we are featuring in the Data Rockstar series, has fully embraced data-centric marketing. They have used data-based insights on out of home advertising all over the world. The irreverent and clever captions provided a chuckle to any passing eyeballs and highlighted the depth of the data that Spotify is able to capture and use.

The use of insights in these advertising campaigns is compelling, and it is genuinely interesting. Learning about consumer behavior in this way is enjoyable, and memorable for its wit!

The insights in the out of home advertising campaigns are mostly aggregated but occasionally individual. In the original 2016 out of home campaign advertising around the world was tailored to insights from that geography around certain cultural happenings, like Brexit in the UK in 2016.

In 2018’s campaign, advertisements in NYC were targeted to the areas where the insight is likely to hit a lookalike audience – as seen in here in New York’s Soho, an area with many brunch spots.

A marketing science heartbeat keeps Spotify pumping

Spotify operates a Marketing Sciences department who are dedicated to growing the company as a data-driven, constantly listening, marketing machine. Using data, Spotify aim to both inspire more fans to listen to more music; and inspire more artists to produce more music, more often.

Ensuring these rich data points get put to use is the job of Mayur Gupta, Spotify’s VP of Growth & Marketing.

It is the ability to deliver the more relevant, personalised and contextual experiences for our users at the intersection of data, technology, and storytelling
– Mayur Gupta

Mayur Gupta is our Data Rockstar in this episode. With a classic computer science background, Gupta is one of the world’s most impressive marketing technologists and often comments on the space.

On marketing, Gupta says that the very first step is to answer a previously unmet consumer need. If not, start again. The next step is to correctly identify the right customers, the risk you run acquiring the wrong ones, people not interested in being there in the first place is far more detrimental.

In a recent article, Gupta commented on audience targeting he says “Before going too wide, start with understanding your existing users: who is the high value highly loyal consumer that you would like to go after?”

Gupta has spoken about finding your brand’s best customers and then marketing to lookalike audiences, using modeling methods such as lifetime value (LTV) segmentation. Finding your best customers can be tricky for many reasons, for example, you may have siloed data, and/or teams working on individual channels instead of together.

A CDP like Lexer, has the ability to unify all of these disparate data sources, and then provide the tools required to segment your best customers, and immediately activate your addressable audiences across all of your channels.

Spotify has amassed an incredible quantity of data and very cleverly used it to not only direct their marketing efforts but actually as the creative for it too. Creatively using customer data is something many brands could apply to their advertising, take Seamless – the US-based restaurant delivery service, who in 2018, created a location-based campaign dishing out faux rewards to the neighborhoods of New York City.

As consumers become more aware of the data being collected on them, it would seem we are leaning-in to a trend of brands publicly acknowledging it – and funnily enough, the approach seems to be working.

Be sure to follow our ongoing series of Data Rockstars we admire like Nike and Stitch Fix, and check out what makes a Data Rockstar tick.

Intrigued to see how a leading retailer is using a Customer Data Platform to fuel their strategy like Spotify? We recently worked with Spyder to increase their email revenue by 94% – learn more here.

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