The music streaming sector has been awash with major updates in recent months. Amazon’s on-demand music streaming service launched this month, Apple Music is signing exclusivity deals with musicians, and Spotify has announced it will now serve up a daily selection of personalised playlists. Amongst all of this noise, brands should be thinking about how they can capitalise on this growing phenomenon; indeed, music streaming services can offer brands much more than strong listening figures. They can give brands contextual knowledge about their users - something infinitely more valuable.
Context is important because it ensures that we see the content at the right moment, when we’re in the right mood, when it is useful or genuinely of interest to us. Up until now, however, it has been very difficult to track and measure emotion from digital data, meaning that context has been difficult to gauge. Attempts to find ‘exactly the right moment’ can be quite crude. We look at dayparts, we use half a dozen emoticons to sum up all human context and emotion. Digital data, so far, has had little emotional depth. We can target the person we want to talk to more accurately than ever before, but we don’t truly know if they’re in the right mood for a conversation.
But what about music, with its infinite variety of emotions? Suppose you could assess context based on the song I’ve just chosen? Because music can and does echo, amplify and express all human emotion. People listen to music to reflect the mood they’re in or to signify the mood they want to be in. Is there a more powerful indicator of mood than music? It transcends “tribes”/genres; it is everyone’s personal soundtrack; it serves as a filing system for memories. Music is more pervasive than movies, sport or even cat video clips.
And given that so much music consumption takes place in the background of someone’s day, accessing and understanding what they are listening to gives us valuable insight into who they are, what they do, and critically, how they feel.
This is the kind of mood data now captured on platforms such as Spotify.
“Our audience uses more than nine million workout playlists. They workout in the morning and after work. These are often young professionals. Most often they sweat to Pop and Rap. That’s great, but more importantly, they are feeling defiant and excited. That’s a powerful, resonant mood to deliver a marketing message – and brands can go further and use that insight to influence the message itself.” says Shiva Rajaraman, VP Product for Spotify.
For marketers this information brings new and exciting options. We are no longer limited to bland demographics, which may help us reach the right person, but possibly not at the right time. We now have access to the richness of mood data such as “defiant and excited”. Or, that the listener is “confident and relaxed” or perhaps feeling “sociable and exploratory.”
MINI is one of the brands that has taken advantage of the richness of mood data. In Italy, MINI offered Spotify users an hour of inspirational music every day that was specific to one of six moments: energy, relax, entertainment, romantic, focus and inspiration. The playlists were a combination of the user’s personal music tastes and the music identity of MINI as a brand.
This is superior at two levels, both in terms of insight - genuinely understanding people through the lens of the music they love and when they love it. And, secondly, at the level of activation - in better knowing when the magical moment comes to best serve that exact message to influence behaviour.
Still, if we only know about people’s mood and music consumption, this could be pretty restrictive. How do we also know whether they’re the right person to serve messages to about cars or chocolate or watches or soap? You then run into a new risk of right mood, wrong person.
The solution is to leverage understanding of mood and music from platforms such as Spotify and merge it with third party data to create even more interesting portraits of our audience. These are portraits which we can use with clients, because we also merge them with our own first party data. This enables us to create personalisation at scale by delivering the right message in the right moment on the right platform at the right time – and in real time. Whether that’s reaching the car buyer, the chocoholic, the watch and soap buyer. But we can go even further and adapt the message to the context they’re in at any given moment.
Finally, given that users of services like Spotify use their playlists as a ritual, listening many times a week or day, we also have the ability to do some pretty amazing narrative storytelling. We can retarget users and continue the narrative in another session, perhaps even another context – e.g. one part of the story occurs when you work out with high energy creative and in a different context we tell you part two when you might be in chill mode in a very different style. Our story can adapt to the context.
Music first played a role in advertising in 1928, when a radio advertisement asking “Have You Tried Wheaties?” hit the air, introducing the jingle as a new tool to drive ad recall. It seems that almost one hundred years later, music could have its most powerful role of all – because of its ability to deliver context. And contextual knowledge ultimately creates a much greater opportunity for brands to change consumer behaviour – the holy grail of marketing.
By Charlotte White, global strategy partner at Carat
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