Netflix and Spotify Ask: Can Data Mining Make for Cute Ads?

While this detracts from the main point of data mining behavioral transactions, I do want to voice the internal debate I have with these ads to get some feedback. I think it's silly that they spent budget on OOH (billboard) ads when considering other options.

These "cute" ads require reading and thinking time, and I question people even stop to absorb and process. Granted, here we are, looking at these ads in a digital medium. Clearly, the KPI is probably "sharability" and ultimately brand awareness. Would it have been more efficient to just release these digitally only? As someone who has lead advertising both on the brand side as well as media agency side and is now trying to fix a lot of hot trash snake oil, I really wonder what the measure success is here beyond "let's do something funny and get people to write about us". Can these brands/agencies answer one simple question backed by data: Was it worth it?

Interesting, I'm a bit shocked that these appear to actually be real user-data pulled things vs editorialized made-up details.

Somewhat also interesting that it looks like the negative feedback started up before the companies commented on how they came up with the lines.

I remember a decade-oldish fast food TV commercial I remember that was something along the lines of "dear person who ordered a double cheeseburger and then felt regret after your buddy ordered a triple: it was only a dollar more", and it was obviously a fictional yet relatable ad. Funny how much things have changed since then, as companies have done such a poor job building anything like consumer trust around data - what was once obviously cheeky and cute (if faked) now comes off as rude and malicious and sneaky but real. And from the article and discussion here, it seems like the less you know about how the ad creation process works/has historically worked, the more likely you are to cry foul on first blush.

> Way to go Spotify, you paid more for that advertising space than you did to the artist for streaming their their content to your users.

How do you know what they paid?

> Using someone else's art as a surveillance marketing tool?

They're not using someone else's art for these statistics.

Your comment makes me wonder how you believe this data is viewed in the business. I work in BI, who are usually the developers who turn such data in to insights that can be comprehended by the people in businesses who don't know the first thing about databases. Just from my personal experience in such analysis, I think it's highly unlikely they're looking at the "who" behind the weird listening patterns they're reporting on.

It's much easier to report anamolous behavior in the form of anonymous aggregations than it is to report on such a fine granularity as individual listening patterns. A simple SELECT statement with an DESC order by and a SUM aggregation could yield that Sean Spicer statistic, without every touching a specific individual's data.

Such detailed reporting tends to actually be counter-productive, as it usually leads to information overload. I highly doubt that any analyst within Spotify has ever looked specifically at your history.

When I first saw the Spotify ads with playlist names, I was a bit concerned about the privacy side of things, since you can search public playlists and most people have their real name attached to their Spotify account.

However, in the article Spotify claims that they sought permission before using playlist names on their advertising, so I can't really be upset about it.