There’s a deep and meaningful connection people have to the music they listen to on Pandora. So, we simply allowed real people to listen to the music they love on Pandora and asked them a very simple question, “How does this song make you feel?”

The resulting imagery, and the films lack of licensed music, provides a glimpse into the power of music, encouraging viewers to "guess the song," and allowing us all to relate to the universal feelings created when we listen to the music we love. For Pandora, it was a first to do a campaign without using music or musicians. It demonstrates the true power music has on us all and it helps to differentiate Pandora from all the other music brands.

This is a 360° campaign including TV, DR, email marketing & custom digital/social across various media partnerships including Thought Catalog, Cracked, Cluep, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope, Twitter & Whisper. The campaign will have on-site activations at Pandora presents ATL (Periscope live artist integration) & Hangout Festival (Snapchat integration in Pandora lounge). This national campaign launches on 4/18 with a tent-pole NBA buy and will continue to run until mid-Dec.

N/A campaign launched 4/18/16

We conducted qualitative interviews with millennials and discovered that there was an opportunity to push off against Spotify’s belief that music is a social experience and Apple’s reliance on tastemakers to draw users in. Using hypnotic qualitative interview techniques with millennial consumers and working closely with academic psychologists, we learned that a more important and meaningful connection we have with music is actually quite personal. As much as we discover music through other people and “top ten” lists, what’s more important is that we connect to music because of how it allows us to connect to ourselves—our feelings, our memories, our humanity. This is an untold story in our category, and that our platform uniquely delivered on.

For years, Pandora has been the category leader in streaming music in the United States. But by 2014, press was predicting “the year of the Pandora killers,” and emerging competitors were spending hundreds of millions to dollars to lure Pandora’s listeners away. In the last two years, our competition (including Apple Music and Spotify) has targeted listeners by leveraging celebrity endorsements and touting on demand product features to lure listeners away from Pandora. But no streaming music service has played at the highest emotional territory by conveying how music connects us to our emotions.

Brief: Pandora believes that music has the power to connect you with your humanity. Pandora is the service that does this best—helping you connect to your feelings and emotions by connecting you to the right music for you.

Objectives: To increase listening hours of lapsed users ages 18-24.