How does music, especially specific songs, really make you feel? Using real people and a documentary approach, we explored our emotional connections with the songs that we love. We had each person bring a song that has deep meaning in their life and filmed them simply listening to that song.

The result is a campaign that feels different than any other campaign about music. By removing the track from the spot, we invite curiosity about what that song is and allow the viewer to fill in the blanks for themselves. Instead of a film driven by a song, it’s many songs that inspired a campaign.

For years, Pandora has been the category leader in streaming music in the United States. But by 2014, competitors had emerged and were spending hundreds of millions to dollars to lure Pandora’s listeners away. In the last two years, the competition has targeted listeners by leveraging celebrity endorsements and touting on demand product features to lure listeners away from Pandora. But Pandora decided to take a different approach and played at the highest emotional territory by conveying how music connects us to our emotions.