Spotify released Wrapped 2022; YouTube's best-performing ads; Black Friday!
A weekly recap of major marketing and tech news you may have missed
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Here is your weekly edition of “5 Minutes of Marketing,” a newsletter delivering the latest marketing, business, and technology news.
The three main stories from Week 48 are: Spotify released its annual Wrapped 2022, revealing the top artists, albums, and songs globally, YouTube revealed its top ads for 2022, and we survived the biggest sales of the year during Black Friday.
So, grab a cup of coffee ☕️ and let’s go!
🤩 Spotify’s annual Wrapped is here
If you use Spotify, you should have received your Wrapped 2022 last week, also featuring top artists, albums, and songs globally. 🙌🏼
Spotify Wrapped is a yearly overview of its user habits on the audio streaming platform, allowing subscribers to share their favorites 🥰 on social media in an engaging way. The company also releases an aggregated edition, revealing the top songs, artists, podcasts, and listening trends of 2022. 📈
It’s a perfect way to use big data and show the awesome side of personalized marketing. Wrapped is the perfect example of Spotify’s commitment to marketing consistency, with the campaign now in its 8️⃣ year.
According to the online information, there are several different ways Spotify logs your listening habits. 🤔 Users will need to listen to a song for more than 30 seconds for it to count in the Spotify song rankings. Your tops are calculated by the number of times it is played rather than for long.
Your total listening time on Spotify also includes listening to podcasts. Your top artists are also calculated by how many times their songs have been played rather than the total listening time.
As part of Spotify’s year-end review, the company also highlighted the top artists and creators on its platform, both globally and on a per-country basis. 🏆 This year, the most-streamed artist globally was Bad Bunny, followed by Taylor Swift, Drake, The Weeknd, and BTS.
I consider Spotify to be among the leaders in consumer-oriented marketing. Their personalization strategies (including annual Wrapped releases) are something that no doubt help their continuous growth. 💸
According to Statista, their paying subscribers have been continuously growing. Spotify perfectly knows its customers and has the capacity to engage and keep them interested.
📹 YouTube’s best-performing ads for 2022
YouTube published its annual list of the ads that performed best on its platform this year, with tech companies and streamers landing in the top 10 at both the global and U.S. level. 👍🏼
The number 1️⃣ ad overall was Amazon’s Super Bowl commercial humorously depicting the strain put on Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost’s relationship after their Alexa smart device became a true mind reader.
HBO Max and Netflix generated engagement with programming-focused promotions, while Clash of Clans and Apple also appeared high on the international rankings. 📊
Absent from the lists were, however, major packaged goods brands, financial services marketers, and retailers, an indication of how those verticals have adjusted strategy in a challenging year. ✌🏼
Amazon remains a powerful force in YouTube advertising, again nabbing the top spot on the year-end rankings with a Super Bowl spot focused on Alexa.
If you think that YouTube ads are not worth it (yes, many of us find them annoying), here is some data to make you come around:
YouTube ads work, and the stats prove it. 70% of YouTube viewers say they have purchased a product after seeing a YouTube ad about said product. 💸
YouTube saw a 25% YoY increase in ad revenue from 2020 to 2021. 🤩 This just proved that more and more brands use YouTube as an advertising platform.
Not only is YouTube the second most popular website in the world behind Google, but it’s also the second-largest search engine in the world behind Google, generating more search queries than Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and Ask combined. This shows how important YouTube SEO is because the platform is also a video and information search tool. 🚨
Not only does YouTube have a large user base, but they also have a highly engaged one, with over 1 billion hours of video content being viewed daily. With the right video content strategy and optimizations like YouTube descriptions, any brand can find an audience for its videos.
🎁 We survived another Black Friday
Yes, Black Friday - the biggest annual sales - has just taken place. With inflation looming, consumers waited until the shopping event to get deals on categories like electronics and sought out financing options such as Buy Now, Pay Later. 💰
As COVID-19 pandemic restrictions cooled off in 2022, many retailers may have hoped for a less complicated Black Friday this year. ✌🏼 But brewing up a new battle for both brands and consumers, inflation 📈 took the stage months before the shopping event began.
🤔 Who was the biggest winner of Black Friday sales?
It’s not a single brand, but rather the trendiest 🏆 payment method - Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL). As reported by Marketing Dive, orders using BNPL rose by 78% the week of Nov. 19 to Nov. 25 when compared to the week before. Additionally, overall revenue from BNPL is up 81% during the same period. 👏🏼
This is where the BNPL providers’ marketing teams should be praised🥇, as they’ve positioned their brands as young, trendy, and appealing to the younger shopping crowds. 🙋🏻♂️ By topping the offers by the retailers with attractive perks, they easily managed to capture the younger segments and make them spend. 💯
The current economy isn’t the best for those willing to splurge, but BNPL addressed that and filled in the gaps, allowing cost-wary consumers to enjoy their shopping sprees nevertheless. 🎁
Other interesting stories:
Meta fined €265m over data protection breach that hit more than 500m users
WhatsApp data leaked: 500 million user records for sale online
SpaceX almost doubles its current Starlink prices in Ukraine
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