WPP and Spotify have announced a new global strategic partnership that will enable WPP to offer its clients early access to Spotify’s innovative ad products, first-party intelligence and creative ways to reach engaged audiences at scale.
As part of the partnership, Spotify will become the first digital audio platform to be integrated directly into WPP’s products and solutions. This includes an exploration in connection with Choreograph’s insights platform. In a first-of-its-kind partnership, WPP will look to use Spotify to develop integrations that provide Spotify’s first-party occasions insights to help clients understand aggregated listening patterns in order to inform more creative and effective digital audio advertising strategies.
WPP will work with Spotify to deliver market-leading thought leadership and scaled training programmes for its employees and clients that focus on digital audio creativity and Spotify’s innovative ad products. WPP’s teams and clients will also benefit from early access to Spotify’s neuro-insights research focused on audience trends and insights.
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 per cent), other audio media (+27 per cent) and social media (+38 per cent), with an increase in numbers from Spotify’s 2021 study.
- 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 per cent 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 per cent) or podcasts (+36 per cent).
Stephan Pretorius (lead image), 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.”
