WPP and Spotify partners to give clients early access to ad products

WPP announced on Thursday that it has signed a global strategic partnership that will enable WPP to give its customers early access to Spotify’s ad products, first-party intelligence, and novel ways to reach engaged audiences at scale. 

Spotify will be the first digital audio platform to be directly integrated into WPP’s products and solutions, as a result of the partnership.

“In the fast-evolving media and entertainment landscape, audio streaming has become an integral part of everyday life. At WPP, we recognise the power of audio as a critical component of marketing. The intent of this first-of-its-kind partnership is to integrate Spotify’s insights with the Choreograph platform to create more innovative and relevant ways to connect our clients with their customers,” said Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer of WPP.

A WPP client-specific version of Spotify’s Sonic Science insights study, carried out with WPP agency Mindshare, that explores the relationship between Spotify, digital audio ads, and listeners, is one of the partnership’s initial outputs.

Utilizing audio ads from WPP clients, Spotify reproduced its Sonic Science Volume 1 study to examine how their ads affect engagement, emotional intensity, memory, and other factors. 

According to the study, with a rise in figures from Spotify’s 2021 study, Spotify continually promotes better levels of engagement compared to other media formats including visual media (+24%), other audio media (+27%), and social media (+38%). 

Additionally, the study discovered that listeners were more attentive to the audio ads from genuine WPP clients in this sample than in the one from 2021, with a 17% increase in ad engagement transference.  

Brian Berner, Global Head of Advertising Sales, Spotify, said: “We’ve long partnered with WPP to enable agency planners and buyers to make more informed decisions when planning for digital audio. With our new global partnership, we’re helping WPP clients modernise their strategy and planning. More than 550 million people across 184 markets come to Spotify every month to be entertained, to learn and to discover for nearly 2.5 hours each day. As we continue to drive innovation in audio and the advertising industry at large, partners like WPP are critical to delivering for advertisers, creators and audiences wherever they are.”  

Back in March, WPP acquired award-winning influencer marketing agency Goat for an undisclosed amount. Within the same month, the company announced the acquisition of the social influencer marketing agency Obviously. In April, the British advertising giant acquired amp, sonic branding agency.