How do you convince spreadsheet-obsessed media planners that Spotify is more than an audio app? This Spotify – Spreadbeats (Case Study) unpacks how Spotify Advertising and FCB New York coded a John Summit music video directly inside a 10MB Excel RFP file – generating a 17:1 ROI, a +5,650% surge in B2B email forwards, and the Cannes Lions Digital Craft Grand Prix.
Background
When media buyers and B2B marketers think of Spotify Advertising, their minds almost reflexively go to audio spots running between music tracks or mid-roll podcast reads. Video advertising rarely enters the initial conversation – and that narrow perception directly restricts Spotify’s commercial growth.
Across global media agencies, planners routinely pigeonhole Spotify into the “audio-only” line item – treating the platform as a nice-to-have, incremental add-on rather than a core audiovisual pillar of the media plan. Even as video consumption and multi-format engagement surged across the platform, Spotify needed to shatter this outdated B2B stereotype and prove the superior return on investment (ROI) of combining sight, sound, and motion inside its ecosystem.
Creative Idea
Conceived in partnership with creative agency FCB New York, Spreadbeats bypassed traditional B2B trade ads to ambush media planners inside the single digital workspace where they spend their entire workday evaluating ad budgets: Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
To demonstrate the visceral power of pairing video with audio in a medium customized exclusively for its target audience, Spotify teamed up with Coachella-headlining electronic producer John Summit (featuring Hayla on the hit track “Shiver”) to engineer a nearly four-minute music video coded entirely inside a working tab of the actual Request for Proposal (RFP) Excel files that Spotify’s global salesforce sends to agency clients.
Upon opening their routine media plan spreadsheet, planners watched millions of static cells, rows, and columns erupt into a choreographed audiovisual spectacle. Every single Spotify Spreadbeats file functioned simultaneously as an interactive music video and a live, fully functional RFP media plan.
Insights & Strategy
The strategic foundation of the Spotify – Spreadbeats (Case Study) stepped directly into the high-pressure reality of a media planner’s daily workflow. Because an agency planner’s job security hinges on proving measurable ROI on a spreadsheet, RFP allocations naturally gravitate toward safe, familiar defaults: performance giants like Google and Meta, video incumbents like YouTube, and viral channels like TikTok. Viewed strictly through cold rows of cost-per-impression numbers, Spotify often looked like an expensive digital radio buy rather than an essential multi-format powerhouse.
Yet Spotify’s actual advertising ecosystem – spanning video takeovers, interactive canvases, and multi-format storytelling – delivers emotional resonance and commercial impact that raw numbers on a grid fail to capture.
To flip the narrative, the strategy hacked the B2B sales process from within:
- Turning the Media Plan into the Medium: Rather than sending another forgettable pitch deck claiming Spotify has video, Spotify turned the RFP spreadsheet itself into undeniable proof of its audiovisual creativity.
- Core Campaign Objectives:
- Rapidly expand agency familiarity with Spotify’s multi-format and video advertising solutions.
- Drive B2B consideration, cultural relevance, and deep brand affinity among global media decision-makers.
Execution
Directed by Vania & Muggia through production studio Iconoclast, with intricate technical engineering led by Uncanny Valley, bringing Spreadbeats to life required an extraordinary feat of “digital archaeology”:
- Engineering a 10MB Excel Masterpiece: Because corporate agency firewalls automatically block large email attachments, the entire four-minute music video had to be compressed into a single, emailable .XLSX file under 10 megabytes. Rejecting modern AI shortcuts or embedded video players, developers went back to the dawn of computing – building every frame from scratch using native, built-in Excel mechanics including ASCII art, Unicode characters, pie charts, bar graphs, cell borders, and conditional formatting.
- The Narrative of Cell “E7”: Technology was anchored in an emotional allegory tailored to data planners. The film follows “E7” – a solitary spreadsheet cell born inside a rigid, monochromatic grid of formulas and numbers where everything is logical, yet something vital is missing. Awakening to the beat of John Summit’s “Shiver,” E7 breaks free from her cell, journeying across vibrant 3D-like spreadsheet landscapes and evolving into complex, colorful geometric forms as audio and video unite.
- Bespoke Sales Generator at Scale: To empower Spotify’s B2B salesforce worldwide, the team built a proprietary internal Spreadbeats Generator. Ahead of any client pitch, a Spotify account executive simply input the media planner’s name, their client’s brand name, and specific campaign parameters, uploaded the actual RFP budget spreadsheet, and clicked “Generate.” Within seconds, the tool output a personalized Excel file where the music video dynamically addressed the recipient by name right alongside their live media plan.
Results
By transforming the most mundane software in corporate life into an unforgettable entertainment stage, the Spotify – Spreadbeats (Case Study) shattered B2B benchmarks, accelerated multi-format ad revenue, and swept international award shows – winning the Digital Craft Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity:
Commercial & B2B Sales Impact
- 17:1 Return on Investment (ROI) generated directly from the campaign.
- +5,650% surge in email forwards compared to standard B2B email marketing benchmarks, as agency planners organically shared the Excel file across their entire departments and holding companies.
- +870% increase in ad engagement compared to Spotify Advertising’s previous paid B2B campaigns – proving firsthand that Spotify’s video capabilities are every bit as captivating as its music.
Case Film
Credits
- Client: Spotify
- Advertising Agency: FCB New York
- Production Company: Uncharted Limbo Collective
- Sound Production: DaHouse Audio
- Website Development: We Are Volume