In Fall 2014, Spotify’s #thatsongwhen digital/social media campaign aimed to have Millennials associate a song with a nostalgic moment in their lives - first kiss, parties in high school, epic sports wins, road trips, etc.

With insights that Millennials were craving more from the digital world, Spotify created a community to invite and encourage meaningful social media participation that allows our audience to create communities - their “us” - through music.

Through targeted outreach, content marketing, influencer outreach and content co-production, and community engagement, #thatsongwhen empowered the Spotify audience to identify themselves through selected songs and reminded them of the importance music plays in their lives.

Our partnership with GrapeStory and over 25 social media influencers launched our campaign authentically, scaling #thatsongwhen stories from individuals with large (500K+) millennial followings to our target audience. By showing our audience stories first from influencers they respected, we motivated them to share their own stories in an uninhibited manner.

From there we published additional social media content leveraging nostalgic moments identified as being emotionally charging to our audience - this content was spread across all Spotify social channels, and gave fans a model to follow to create and share their own moments.

In effect, Spotify sparked conversation around nostalgia and music that enabled social media users to connect with one another at a deeper, more authentic level.

1. Execution (100 words max)

We found real stories around music and brought them to life in reenactments featuring the real storytellers. The stories we’re found by driving users and non-users to a platform where music lovers claimed songs and attached their stories to them. They then shared thousands of memories and songs across their social networks and users on Vine reenacted their own stories. To top it off, some of the favorite stories were then reenacted in short, comical pieces of branded content in the form of :30 to :60 videos.

Creating an emotional connection between Spotify and consumers was our main goal. But the campaign did much more than that. During the campaign our monthly active users increased 29.6%. That Song When playlists streamed over 900,000 times. And our main focus, brand love, went from 53% to 72% in the digital space.