Spotify, the world’s favourite music app was coming to India at a time when the music streaming market was inundated with numerous local players. Additionally, Indians were still in the process of developing a music streaming habit. They were far more content to listen to (and watch) their music on YouTube. Given the sheer range of music that Indians listen to - from Bollywood to regional hip-hop, rap and love ballads – the challenge for Spotify was to prove that even though it was an international brand, it had the capability of understanding life in India and a culturally diverse nation.

The objective: To drive awareness about Spotify now being live in India with over 3 billion playlists, one for every Indian situation and chaos. And to drive subscription growth.

With over 3 billion playlists available at the touch of a button, Spotify was in a position to help Indians navigate this chaos.

We scanned our target cities and realized that a significant percentage of their daily struggles are concentrated to specific high-footprint areas or streets. Using geo-targeted social media listening, we kept an eye on the trending topics our potential subscribers had spoken about in the past year in co-relation to these spots.

Sentiment analysis of this data helped us categorize a single mood for every location based on which we developed hyper-contextual messages. Each hoarding featured a relevant playlist that would provide some relief against the chaos.

We decided to talk to two sets of music streamers (100 million) –

• Young International Streamers: 15-27 years old habitual music streamers who had likely heard of Spotify from their global counterparts, through their travels or via pop culture.

• Urban Streamers: 20-35 years old local music streamers who have an affinity for Bollywood and regional music

After analyzing their daily routine, we pin-pointed specific high-footprint areas or streets were likely to add to their chaos. It included areas that had a high tendency of spawning traffic jams, office hubs, commute points, colleges, etc. Using geo-targeted social media listening, we kept an eye on the trending topics our potential subscribers had spoken about in the past year in co-relation to these spots.

Sentiment analysis of this data helped us categorize a single mood for every location based on which we developed hyper-contextual outdoor messages. Each hoarding featured a relevant playlist that would provide some relief against the chaos.

After scouring 29 states across the nation, we finally settled on 1153 unique sites.

For every site, a hyper contextual message was crafted after a sentiment analysis of the mood of the area. For example, at off-shore call centers regular night shifts became the woe of all.

Using geo-targeted media listening, Spotify wanted to let every Indian know that no matter what he/she is going through in that particular location, there’s a playlist by Spotify to help deal with it.

With 1153 unique messages and playlists for 1153 locations across India, Spotify was able to bring alive this message –

Whatever the situation maybe, whether it is celebratory or sad, relaxing or heartbreaking, Spotify has a playlist for that.

The ‘There’s a playlist for that’ OOH campaign was a resounding success with the youth of India, with 641,600 people engagements and 185,000 unique mentions on social media. And over 2 million monthly active users.