Spotify Canada is trying to create a true soundtrack for Canadians’ lives with its new “Music for Your World” campaign, its first since launching here last September.
The campaign, launching today, includes special playlists centred around particular spots of Toronto (King St.), Vancouver (Stanley Park), Montreal (Plateau), and Calgary (17th Avenue). The brand has also launched a promotion today for new users to Spotify’s premium service to pay 99 cents for three months (a premium account is $10 per month).
Since launching here, the brand has been determining the best ways to connect with Canadians and give them a reason to use the service, making now the right time to launch its first campaign, says James Herbert, Spotify’s head of marketing in Canada
“We want to make sure that the service we provide to Canadians is tailored and customized to the Canadian audience,” he says. “One way we thought we could do that is to soundtrack some of those iconic neighbourhoods, moments and places in Canada.”
Each playlist has an average of 100 songs, pulled together mainly through the service’s data insights team. “First and foremost, it is data driven,” Herbert says. “We’ve quite meticulously looked through the most popular songs that are streamed in those areas.”
Spotify’s internal editorial team and certain pop culture influencers, such as Urbanology magazine co-founder Priya Ramanujam, Calgary’s The Style Guys and Montreal’s Westmount Fashionista, have also helped curate the lists.
The service will be promoting the new “Music for Your World” campaign with eight weeks of OOH placements, digital display and banner ads. Creative was led by Anomaly, with Universal McCann handling the media buy. The OOH placements will be tailored to the particular neighbourhood to drive people to the playlists and to Spotify’s site. For instance, ads along Toronto’s heavily-used 504 King streetcar route will be focused on that particular playlist.
The brand is also using a reactive social campaign to connect people with the “Music for Your World” content, which Herbert says provides an opportunity “to create meaningful, personal and relevant playlisting in response to social messaging.” When certain people that Spotify will be monitoring, such as music editors and other pop culture influencers, or other people engaging in a unique way with the brand post on social media, it will respond by posting its playlists. For example, when someone tweets about being stuck in traffic or going out with friends, Spotify will respond with its curated playlists related to those everyday occurrences. That component of the campaign will include some paid support, focused on promoting posts the brand sees as already performing well organically.
As of mid-April, the music streaming service had 60 million users worldwide, with 45 million on the free service and 15 million on the ad-free paid version.
With files from Val Maloney
