Spotify recently rolled out the latest edition of its Wrapped year in review campaign, widely celebrated for its clever use of data to provide insight into listeners’ Spotify habits, both on an individual and a global level.
When Spotify began its Wrapped reviews, it was relatively unusual for opting to use data in this way. Through Wrapped, Spotify demonstrated its ability to use data to tell personalised stories about users’ years in music, as well as to extract pithy, funny insights about collective listening trends.
Spotify Wrapped has paved the way for a whole genre of ‘year in review’ data storytelling campaigns as brands look to replicate Spotify’s success in engaging users with their data and promoting social sharing and loyalty.
Not every brand has Spotify’s reams of user data, of course – but scale isn’t the most important factor in creating an effective Year in Review. Here are some of the key components of a Year in Review campaign that resonates, drawing on examples from brands such as Pasta Evangelists, Asda, Peloton, and AllTrails.
In order to craft a good Year in Review campaign, organisations need the right data, which will tell the most compelling story about the brand, its product or service, and its customers throughout the year.
However, this isn’t always straightforward, as Angharad Exley, Senior Marketing Manager at Pasta Evangelists, explained during a talk about the brand’s approach to CRM and personalisation. “Having data in different areas is quite common,” she said – often it will be bound up in different tools such as an email platform. “The challenge is being able to use data effectively.”
Exley talked about Pasta Evangelists’ journey to create its own ‘Wrapped’ campaign and the considerations that went into it: including the fact that not every type of product or service lends itself well to a Year in Review.
Ideally, a Year in Review campaign aims to make customers feel inspired and eager to continue engaging with the brand; however, customers may not be keen to look back over, say, a year of financial transactions or insurance claims.
“It needs to be fun … it needs to be something that people will want to shout about,” Exley said of the ideal Wrapped subject matter.
The archetypal Year in Review campaign is a personal reflection: looking back over a year of song listening, fitness tracking, game playing, book reading, or similar. Spotify Wrapped set the tone for this with its hyper-personalised insights into listeners’ top artists, top genres, top music, and even what part of the world their listening habits most resemble.
It’s not hard to see why it works: users enjoy looking back over their changing personal tastes, or alternatively personal achievements, and often like to show them off with social sharing.
However, brands don’t need to collect data on the scale of Spotify to be able to offer this. An attentiveness to first-party data and CRM can yield a wide range of insights that brands can use to build a personalised Year in Review campaign – particularly if they have a loyalty app or programme.
For example, Asda crafted a personal ‘Year in Review’-style email campaign to celebrate six months of its Asda Rewards loyalty programme, and delivered individualised insights to Rewards users such as the date they joined the programme, the number of ‘Star Products’ they had purchased, and what day of the week they typically scanned their loyalty app.
Speaking at Think Summit Europe in October, Asda CRM Manager Bria Edwards-Joseph described Asda’s success with data storytelling using the ‘Year in Review’ campaign, and particularly the improved results the brand enjoyed from sending out personalised insights.
“We [were] able to do some really fun, sophisticated things with the data by creating applications to allow us to surface, for example, on average, how long it takes that customer to complete a milestone mission,” said Edwards-Joseph.
“[Thanks to personalisation], we saw a huge 43% uplift in direct click-throughs, compared with a non-personalised campaign.”
Asda made the decision to repeat the campaign for Asda Rewards’ first birthday, incorporating some additional community-wide insights such as the most popular ‘missions’ and products to purchase with rewards, and again saw a 179% increase in direct engagement compared with a generic campaign.
Users also love to share their personalised milestones on social media, which provides brands with additional reach and awareness for their ‘Year in Review’ and potentially even drawing the interest of new customers. In anticipation of this, brands will often create a dedicated hashtag, such as #Wrapped2023 (Spotify Wrapped) or #PelotonCooldown (The Cooldown, Peloton) to facilitate sharing.
Distinctive creative can also help to set personalised campaigns apart and give social sharing more impact. In 2021, creative studio Stink Studios, who collaborated with Peloton to create The Cooldown, shared that they created “a unique, personalised title frame” for each Cooldown video “in anticipation of the community sharing on Instagram”, resulting in “a dynamic and varied showcase of the campaign under the #PelotonCooldown hashtag”.
Personalisation is key to ensuring that a campaign resonates with individual consumers, but statistics and insights from the wider community can give a sense of collective achievement and scale, helping consumers feel that they have contributed to something bigger.
Google’s Year in Search, for example, is a highly impactful annual ‘look back’ campaign that uses global search trends to tell the story of the year – and is widely shared and enjoyed despite not being personalised.
In its 2022 Year in Review email, trail guides app AllTrails used the opportunity to signpost different capabilities of the app, such as the ability to record trail time with the ‘Navigator’ function, using community statistics like the collective number of miles logged by the community.
AllTrails also showed off its charitable partnership with One Tree Planted, which plants trees based on orders placed in the AllTrails Gear Shop and users invited to use the app, by revealing that the community planted more than 70,000 trees in 2022.
Fitbit is known for publishing aggregated community statistics ahead of sending out its personalised Year in Review emails. The personalised email invites users to explore these, telling them, “You’re part of a global movement”. In 2022, Fitbit’s aggregated global statistics ranked countries based on their ‘Active Zone Minutes’ (moderate or vigorous-intensity activity), number of steps, sleep quantity, and more.
Previous editions of Fitbit’s Year in Review have also included figures to put the numbers into perspective: for example, comparing the collective calories burned by users in the United States to “running 527.6 ultra marathons”.
There’s no one ‘correct’ way to put together a Year in Review campaign, whether for individual users or the wider community, but with the right planning and execution, it can be a fertile opportunity for impactful data storytelling.
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