How do you wrap up a year like 2016? In a year that was all about our differences, Spotify tuned into our users’ listening habits to remind us...we’re all a little bit weird. We found that thousands of people were listening to the exact same song the day of the Brexit vote. Someone in LA listened to the song “Panda” 4,454 times. Exactly 21,043 Londoners mourned the loss of a famous nightclub with the same Robyn track. And 1,235 guys in New York loved the “Girls Night” playlist.

We found 164 of these unique data stories and shared them as open letters to our listeners, placing each piece of creative in the exact neighborhoods where these listeners lived. The hyper-localized campaign was executed across 8,000 boards in 11 different countries under the tagline, “Thanks, 2016. It’s been weird.”

The campaign was launched at the very beginning of December across all 11 markets, allowing us to get out ahead of competing “year in review” content. And the most provocative executions were photographed and shared with PR outlets on the day of launch - allowing for not just the earned media that came with press coverage, but also for easy social sharing by consumers.

The consumer participation and digital life this work took on exceeded our expectations. Images of the OOH executions were shared by consumers over 669,000 times. One consumer posted images on viral photo-sharing site Imgur, driving nearly 500,000 organic views alone. Many even went as far as to create their own parody versions, inspired by the creative construct.

We measured the business campaign in three parts: subscription growth, interaction with the product, and brand awareness – and had significantly successful results on all accounts. With regard to growth: during the course of the campaign’s run, Spotify subscription growth easily broke all company records. The increase in MAU exceeded targets, with over 1 billion streams directly attributed to the campaign, and over half a million reactivated users. And consideration of the brand grew by an average of 10% in the markets that ran the campaign, compared to those that didn’t.

“Thanks 2016. It’s been weird.” was an outdoor campaign that challenged the idea that static outdoor can’t inspire social sharing and virality.

Our strategy was to gain reach & impressions through Outdoor media and earned media through a relevant & provocative approach.

We used data to identify 2016’s artists & songs that were most relevant for targeted audiences- providing the team with a long-list of potential content.

Our data analysts worked through billions of streams to find outliers - that single New York-based user who listened to Justin Beiber’s “Sorry” 47 times on Valentine’s Day, or the user who listened to the Hamilton Soundtrack so much they must have sometimes been asleep.

We then used that data to determine where the media should be placed - a story about a single listener in Brooklyn was placed on the side of a Williamsburg bar. That story about Londoners’ loss of a famous nightclub was shared in the streets surrounding the club’s home. And the Hamilton super-fan? They were celebrated in the heart of Broadway.

The end of the calendar year is a key time for Spotify, offering the opportunity for the brand to further its status as a cultural and musical force, by using the edge it has as a tech company – data.

In 2016, Spotify used this moment to launch its biggest brand campaign ever, with ambitious business objectives.

We were charged with crafting a global outdoor campaign that would appeal equally to both existing users and non-users. The desired outcome was an increase in Monthly Active Users (MAU), by appealing to existing and lapsed users. And an increase in subscriptions, by reaching new users.

The landscape was not only more crowded in terms of competitors, including Apple, but culturally the timing was difficult. 2016 was a notably awful and divisive year, and celebrating it with a traditionally optimistic year-end campaign posed a challenge.