Every year, Spotify launches their signature Wrapped campaign and takes over the world for a few days. And every year, countless brands fall into the “Spotify Wrapped trap,” thinking they have to do their own year-in-review campaign, trying to replicate the same kind of magic. The problem is, they try to imitate the output, but miss the real reason the campaign was successful in the first place.
Wrapped is a masterclass in personalization. But it’s not successful because it’s a great “year-in-review” campaign: Wrapped isn’t a template. It isn’t a format. It isn’t even a campaign. It’s the output of a system that’s been learning from millions of users for a decade — and it’s turned a yearly campaign into a product launch in and of itself.
The missing component
When it comes to year-in-review campaigns, most brands have the same ingredients (data) but not the same kitchen (infrastructure). Subsequently, they confuse having data with using it.
The reality that most companies are uncomfortable admitting is that many year-in-review campaigns simply tell the customer what they did. As a result, they usually end up looking something like this: “You bought XYZ”, “You completed XYZ”, “You spent XYZ”, “You streamed XYZ”.
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