I received a smart D2C promotion from Spotify over the weekend designed to inspire parents & kids to create playlists as a family activity… and it immediately reminded me of Hasbro’s ‘Family Game Night’ campaign.
Earlier in my career I worked at the NYC ad agency Griffin Bacal Advertising. And at the time, it was the leading kids + family agency behind lots of industry firsts. While I was there, Hasbro was a big client and one of their campaigns was #FamilyGameNight – which eventually even became its own TV game show and video game franchise. I think the original campaign was created by then president Paul Kurnit… but if I’m wrong, he can correct me here in the comments 😉
IMHO the ‘Family Game Night’ campaign supported a brilliant strategy which effectively targeted multiple age groups (both parents and kids), supported a “full line” which included several classic games at once for subsequent purchases (#Monopoly, Sorry, Life, Clue, Operation, Mouse Trap, etc), and most interesting to me, it created family “traditions” while subtly instilling brand loyalty with kids that they would embrace until they’re eventually the parents.
Enter Spotify.
A couple weeks ago I read an article in Bloomberg in which Spotify’s founder and CEO Daniel Ek acknowledged that his youngest generation of listeners (Gen Z and younger) aren’t big Spotify users. He summed it up by saying “We could be doing better in that group,” right after he cited a quote from Intel’s legendary CEO Andy Grove – “only the paranoid survive.”
Seems like every non-gaming media company except #TikTok is having similar realizations.
With this recent news in mind, I wondered what promotional tactics (or even strategies) Spotify might begin testing (besides adding TikTok-like features) in order to better-appeal to younger listeners. And that’s when their own ‘Family Game Night’ landed in my inbox. Family Playlisting!
Spotify’s message went like this:
Let’s face it, finding an activity that keeps the whole family happy is borderline impossible. You’ve tried cards, you’ve tried board games and the less said about what happened when you suggested charades the better. So how about a collaborative playlist instead?
Brilliant!
So far I’ve only seen this promotion as a D2C newsletter, so I don’t yet know if it’s being fleshed out into a full campaign, but I do love the thinking. What better way for Spotify to inspire teens to embrace Spotify than to target them while they’re still tweens… and have their Spotify-obsessed Gen X Parents do the heavy lifting for them?
Bonus feature: no brawl for the aux cord next dinner time.
Blast from the past… I’d love to hear what my kids-marketing co-conspirators of years-past think about this Spotify promotion. Pete Bregman, Bob Marks, Heather Eyrich, Stacy Lewis, Julius Weil…what do you think?