Spotify Advertising
University

Scenario:

The University of Houston Downtown came to IKROH wanting to increase student uptake in a certain area, through the utilisation of Spotify Advertising. They understood that Spotify could reach both students and potential students throughout the day, and set about creating an advertising campaign to capitalise on this opportunity.

Strategy:

IKROH’s first step in developing an effective Spotify advertising campaign was to identify the University of Houston Downtown’s target market, using parameters such as age, gender, and geographical location. This was obviously going to be current university students and potential university students, and once that had been established we began to explore how and when Spotify listeners use its services.
We discovered that 81% of Spotify listeners stream music at home, 79% stream in the car, and 49% stream at work or school. With this in mind, we set up campaigns that would effectively utilise this knowledge, designed to reach students throughout their day on a variety of platforms such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones.
We advised on several creative aspects of the campaign and assisted with budgeting to make sure that the client was able to get the most out of their campaign. For example, we were aware that adverts on Spotify only ran if the user was active in player; if Spotify was simply running in the background or the window was minimised, the adverts would not run, meaning we could ensure the adverts we created could be more effective by directly targeting the user in the moment.

Results:

The campaign delivered in full and on time while posting a 0.14% click-through rate (CTR), outperforming Spotify's Q1 benchmark for education brands by 75%.
From a platform perspective, mobile led the way with the vast majority of total clicks - iOS devices were the top CTR performers on mobile. In terms of demographics, male listeners outperformed their female counterparts' CTR slightly (8% higher) and listeners age 35-44 had the highest CTR of any age bracket. We're extremely pleased with how the campaign performed.