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Gen-Z, B2B Opps: Spotify taps global heads of marketing, social media marketing (Score 90)

Taj Alavi joined music platform Spotify as its global head of marketing earlier in June 2021. Alavi joined from Chime, where she was marketing and communications VP. Since it seems that she'll have say over its ad budget, Alavi's hire should result in a continuation of Spotify's digital spend increases.

The same month, the company selected Ken Gibbs, the former head of Amazon's original Prime series' social, as the global head of its social media marketing.

Spotify started promoting its audiobooks and podcasts more within the past year; many consumers started listening to less music during the pandemic without the need of car-ride entertainment. As you can tell by the video above, Spotify has resumed advertising its music more heavily now that the vaccine has helped people get out and about more.

So far this year, iSpot reports that the company has spent approximately $17.2k on national TV commercials, a mere sliver of the approximately $1.9m it spent within the same 2020 timeframe. Spotify ended up spending approximately $8.9m on this channel last year, a huge spike from the approximately $5.6k it spent in 2019. The company's 2021 commercials have targeted a wide but female-skewed audience through shows such as The Bobby Brown Story, Zombies, the She's All That movie, Verified Videos and Epic.Awesome.Videos.

According to Pathmatics, Spotify has allocated roughly $23.5m toward digital ads YTD, up slightly (7%) from the roughly $21.9m it had allocated by this point last year. The company's estimated full-year 2020 spend reached $54.8m, around double that of $26.8m in 2019. Since the beginning of 2021, Spotify has earned ~3.3b digital impressions via Instagram (52%), Facebook (30%), desktop display (11%), Twitter (4%), mobile display (2%) and desktop video (1%) ads.

Additionally, Magellan reveals Spotify has aired a whopping 6.2k podcast ads within the past 12 months.

This company is largely targeting Gen-Z through paid social right now; however, per Kantar data, it's also targeting older generations through more traditional channels such as OOH, radio, print and local broadcast. If I were you, though, I'd focus on offering high-ROI strategies among the former audience considering recent hire Gibbs's responsibilities. It also targets businesses that might use its platform to advertise.

Agency & martech readers - Spotify was already vulnerable to review due to Universal McCann is its media AOR. Thus, you'll probably have the best luck offering digital analytics services, especially considering Spotify's increasing digital spend.