COLOGNE — Music is inherently personal. And, when Daniel Ek co-founded Spotify a decade ago, it didn’t take long for the company to embed that fact in the software. Soon, playlists became the order of the day.
But that is not the only way music personalization can manifest. And listeners themselves may not be the only party to benefit.
“Our listeners really trust us,” says Marco Bertozzi, VP Head of Sales, Europe at Spotify.
Bertozzi in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Hopefully, we can allow advertisers to benefit from that trust as well.”
Spotify currently is obsessed by delivering listeners the right music for them at the right time – and, in so doing, helping advertisers to reach the right listeners at the right time.
Twin strategies of requiring a user account and supporting ubiquity across listening devices are what gives Spotify this super power.
Bertozzi continues: “Now what that allows us to do is say, ‘Okay, now we know that an individual is streaming in the car’.
“So rather than guesswork and advertisers, if they want to reach the morning commute, just buying media between 9:00 and whatever, 6:00 and 10:00, we can actually say, ‘These people are in the car streaming Spotify, and you have the opportunity to target an ad to that environment’.”
On top of recommending spot-on tracks to users through its Discover, Discover Weekly and Release Radar sections, recent initiatives have included:
- Launching a free-to-play tier this year, with immediate onboarding to express personal listening preferences.
- Introducing Ad Studio, a self-service ad-buying platform for small businesses.
- Solidifying availability of video ad units.
- Custom audience segments combining client data, Spotify data and third-party data.
He was better known to Beet.TV viewers as the man who helped grow Publicis’ programmatic advertising business.
But last year Marco Bertozzi jumped out of the agency world and in to the music subscription startup, when he was named Europe VP and head of sales for the service. Now Bertozzi is in harmony with the music software.
“If we’re going to help lots of artists make a living, we’ve got to help them be found by listeners,” he says. “So discovery’s at the heart of everything we do. The more we discover, the more we can personalize what people like, what they’re listening to.
“We’ve done research in one of the markets in the Netherlands with TNS that shows that people on average are paying 17% more attention to our ads than standard radio.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
