Spotify and WPP Announce Global Partnership, Enabling Early Access to Innovative Ad Products and Audience Insights
WPP, the multinational advertising and public relations company, has joined forces with Spotify in a groundbreaking strategic partnership. Through this collaboration, WPP’s clients will gain exclusive access to Spotify’s cutting-edge advertising products, first-party intelligence, and unique methods to engage with large and active audiences worldwide.
Notably, Spotify will be seamlessly integrated into WPP’s suite of products and solutions, making it the first digital audio platform to achieve this level of integration. Choreograph’s insights platform will also be explored in connection with this partnership. By leveraging Spotify’s first-party occasions insights, WPP aims to offer clients valuable aggregated listening patterns data, empowering them to create more effective and creative digital audio advertising strategies.
In addition to early access to Spotify’s ad products and insights, WPP will collaborate with the audio platform to deliver market-leading thought leadership and comprehensive training programs focused on digital audio creativity. Spotify’s innovative ad products will be at the forefront of these training initiatives. Moreover, WPP’s teams and clients will benefit from early access to Spotify’s neuro-insights research, which provides valuable audience trends and insights. This comprehensive partnership aims to revolutionize the way brands reach their target audiences in the digital audio advertising space.
One of the first outputs of the partnership is a WPP client-specific version of Spotify’s Sonic Science insights study, conducted with WPP agency Mindshare, that details the connection between Spotify, digital audio ads and listeners. Working with research firm Neuro-Insight, Spotify recreated its Sonic Science Volume 1 study using audio ads from WPP clients to explore how their ads trigger engagement, emotional intensity, memory, and more. Notable findings include:
Immersed Audience: Spotify consistently drives higher levels of engagement vs. other media formats like visual media (+24%), other audio media (+27%) and social media (+38%), with an increase in numbers from Spotify’s 2021 study[1].
Increased Ad Engagement: We found that listeners were more engaged with the ads from WPP clients in this study than in the 2021 study, with a 17% increase on ad engagement transference when listeners went from listening to music or podcasts to a real WPP client’s audio ad.
Strong engagement in both podcast and music environments: The study showed that ad engagement remains high with listeners no matter if they were listening to music (+29%) or podcasts (+36%)[2].
Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer of WPP, said: “In the fast-evolving media and entertainment landscape, audio streaming has become an integral part of everyday life. At WPP, we recognise the power of audio as a critical component of marketing. The intent of this first-of-its-kind partnership is to integrate Spotify’s insights with the Choreograph platform to create more innovative and relevant ways to connect our clients with their customers.”
Brian Berner, Global Head of Advertising Sales, Spotify, said: “We’ve long partnered with WPP to enable agency planners and buyers to make more informed decisions when planning for digital audio. With our new global partnership, we’re helping WPP clients modernise their strategy and planning. More than 550 million people across 184 markets come to Spotify every month to be entertained, to learn and to discover for nearly 2.5 hours each day. As we continue to drive innovation in audio and the advertising industry at large, partners like WPP are critical to delivering for advertisers, creators and audiences wherever they are.”
[1] Sonic Science Volume 1, Neuro-Insight and Spotify, June 2021
[1] Ibid
Additional insights from the Sonic Science study, as well as tips for advertisers on how to get started with digital audio can be found here: WPP Sonic Science study.
