Project Overview

A 30 second brand video for Spotify that brings their music service into the context of an adventurous and restless millennial audience. The result is a celebration of creativity, experience, and the songs that tie them together.

Organisation

Zandrak

Team

Charles Frank- Directing and Editing
Andrew Hutcheson- Producing
David Brickel- Project Management
Kyle Harper- Writing and Marketing

Project Brief

Spotify is quickly growing to be a household name for on demand music. With their comprehensive library of songs, hip brand, and enjoyable interface, the only challenge left is to convince avid listeners to switch from their comfortable, old playlists to something new.

So when Spotify London put out a brief looking for creatives to come up with a 30 second digital video that would invite millennials into the Spotify fold, we knew we couldn't pass it up.

Project Innovation/Need

For this project, our video needed to:
1) faithfully represent the Spotify brand
2) be targeted towards a millennial audience, particularly avid music listeners
3) be no longer that 30 seconds in length
4) capture attention and remain engaging in a digital format
5) represent content that viewers would want to share through social media
6) in some way mention their new playlist sharing feature

The easiest way to approach these directives would have been to focus on the app feature, which is certainly the most unique element of the pitch. However, we didn't think features would engage a millennial audience as much as a story. So instead, we decided to approach the project from a narrative angle: in what way could this new feature tell us something about a character or their story? The result was an adventure between three friends, made possible by the Spotify app and the experiential lifestyle it encourages.

Design Challenge

The primary challenge for this project was definitely the time constraint. Building a narrative around an app is difficult enough, particularly because we were focused on doing so in a way that was subtle. But this challenge was only compounded by the fact that we had a number of directives that needed to be fulfilled in a tiny span of time. The only really way to address this was to come up with a concept that hit every directive at once, rather than a longer piece that would fulfill them one at a time as the story progressed. But while this required much of us in the conceptualization phase, it resulted in an idea that was easily executed in only a few days.

Effectiveness

Overall, the project was able to be completed to the satisfaction of every client directive, while also preserving the aesthetic and subtlety that we wanted to bring to the piece. As result, the work was promoted across Spotify's UK social media platforms and aided in promoting brand image and driving social traffic.