How Spotify and Other Top Brands Are Nailing Their Year-in-Review Campaigns

As the year draws to a close, many businesses are preparing to launch their 'Year-in-review' campaigns. 

Year-in-review campaigns are a concept you’re likely to be familiar with due to their jump in popularity over the last few years. They are a snappy and creative summary of a customer’s achievements and milestones throughout their year with a product, service, or brand.  

These ‘wrap-up’ style campaigns serve as an innovative engagement tactic thanks to their clever use of data personalisation, summarising customers’ habits and activities within their app, on their fitness device, and more. 

How did the trend begin?

In 2016, Spotify pioneered the trend with ‘Spotify Wrapped’. Ever since then, Spotify users have been receiving yearly wrap-up videos that summarise their listening habits and preferences from throughout the past year. The annual campaign is an eagerly awaited communication for Spotify users that they widely share amongst friends and makes waves on social media.  

Who caught on to the trend?

Many other businesses have since hopped on board the trend after witnessing its success amongst consumers, by adapting Spotify’s year ‘Wrapped Up’ format to align with their own brand and user data. At the end of 2022, we saw year wrapped-up campaigns from a wide range of major brands.  

This blog will reflect on how these brands have added their own twist to the year-in-review trend over years-passed, to inspire your business, no matter how big or small, to wrap up 2023 with your customers.

Spotify Wrapped

It all began with Spotify Wrapped...  

Music is known to bring people together, so it’s no surprise why users of the #1 music app love to receive and share their yearly listening recaps. Who wouldn’t boast to their friends that they’re in Beyonce’s top 5% of listeners? One Spotify user took to Twitter to claim his record-breaking listening time of 125,972 minutes as was revealed to him in his 2022 listening wrap-up. What could prove you love music more? 

Spotify Wrapped has garnered some impressive achievements over the last 2 years, with the campaign being shared over 60 million times across social media platforms. But what makes it so successful that it’s inspired marketers around the world to take on the concept? 

The User Journey

At the beginning of December each year, Spotify users open the app to their personalised Spotify Wrapped video. Using the story format (mobile), each user can tap through to reveal their breakdown of listening habits, which includes a range of personalised stats: 

• Amount of genre’s explored; 

• Top 5 genres; 

• Total listening time; 

• Top song (and the date it was most played); 

• Top 5 songs on repeat; 

• Top artist (and number of minutes listened, including what percentile of top listeners they fall in to);  

• Top 5 artists 

• Top Podcast  

• Top 5 Podcasts 

But it would be repetitive if Spotify stuck to the same format each year, right? That’s why they work hard to continue reimagining the ‘wrap-up’ season with a revamp each year. With updated colourful designs and geometric patterns, new interactive elements, and additional personalisation points, their marketing team doesn’t fail to spice it up.

2022’s campaign came with a twist, categorising each listener into a ‘Listening Personality’. Users found out if they were an ‘Adventurer’, a ‘Fanclubber’, a ‘Replayer’, a ‘Time Traveler’, or a ‘Top Charter’, to name just a few. This element brought an entirely new layer of personalisation to the Wrapped experience, shining a light on the different ways that listeners find joy in their music, and how their music interests play a role in their sense of self. 

This wasn’t the only newly added feature in 2022. Personality types were further broken down to morning, afternoon, and night. The ‘Audio Day’ feature told everyone whether their mornings started with ‘Hype Lit Energy’ or if they embraced the night with ‘Hopeless Romantic Energy’. Did users appreciate Spotify commenting on their music taste in 2022, or did they reveal information that listeners weren’t interested in finding out?  

Spotify Wrapped wouldn’t be so successful if people didn’t know about it. Thanks to the well-thought-out user journey, listeners can download their own one-page ‘Wrapped’ card, and share these with friends and family, or to social media. This interactive sharing feature has served the multi-billion streaming company well, acting as the catalyst to get people talking all things Spotify on social media. In 2021, ‘Spotify Wrapped' was so talked about that it brought in an impressive 400 million tweets!  

The year ‘Wrapped’ campaign doesn’t end there. Spotify go above and beyond for their listeners by creating personalised ‘Wrapped’ playlists for each user at the end of their video recap, with an interactive feature that allows them to add their top 100 songs to their music library at the click of an in-video button.

What will Spotify do differently this year? 

Strava's Year in Sport

The running, cycling, and hiking app, Strava, weren’t far behind in jumping on the ‘wrapped’ trend in 2017 with their ‘Year in Sport’ campaign.  

It’s reported that 82% of athletes like to keep track of their fitness using tracking technology, so it’s understandable why Strava thought their audience of over 100 million users would appreciate a yearly performance breakdown.  

Like Spotify, Strava decided to deliver their ‘Year in Sport’ in video format. They make their videos engaging with sporty graphics and playful words of encouragement. After all, runner’s, cyclists, hikers and other sports enthusiasts want to celebrate how far they’ve come with every workout and fitness achievement.  

Strava’s ‘Year in Sport’ video uses personalisation to break down every step in the journey: 

• Total Days Active; 

• Top Sports; 

• Fastest Activities; 

• Longest Activity; 

• Personal Records (measured in ‘kudos’); 

• Total Elevation; 

• Total Distance Hiked. 

The wrap-up campaign goes on to encourage users to share with friends their milestones on Strava from throughout the year with playful language; “Go ahead, share – it's ok to brag a little.” 

FitBit's Year in Review

Strava aren’t the only fitness brand who are delivering year-in-reviews, but they may be the ones doing it the best by using video. Whilst FitBit’s Year in Review campaign is popular among its users, they are yet to use video to present the recap of steps, sleep, and activity; which could add a more dynamic and engaging element to the experience. 

FitBit’s Year in Review email campaign is personalised to each user by breaking down their health and fitness habits. However, without a video to maximise engagement, could their campaign be missing out on further engagement? 

FitBit looked back at each user's year with a personalised summary of their health and fitness activity: 

• Activity: Most active day, total steps, total days of exercise; 

• Sleep: Average hours of sleep, average bedtime, average wake-up, average sleep score; 

• Heart Rate: Total active zone minutes, daily average active zone minutes, day with the most active zone minutes. 

DuoLingo's #DuoLingo365

DuoLingo, the world’s most popular language-learning app, have over 500 million registered users. With such a vast number of people using the platform, who are each on their own unique language learning journey, it’s essential to utilise relationship marketing tools to help them get the most out of their experience. Which is why a personalised year-in-review campaign is the perfect fit for DuoLingo.  

The company found showcasing learners’ key achievements in a fun and emotive story format to be a great use case for the ‘Year in Review’ campaign concept. After all, being able to look back on progress is one of the key motivational factors for learning a language.  

DuoLingo’s Year in Review has had quite the evolution since they began their wrap-up journey in 2019. Initially, they stuck to a simple newsletter style format. But in 2020, they stepped up their game by allowing users to access their personalised reports within the DuoLingo App, with an added interactive share button. DuoLingo’s mascot, ‘Duo’, appears in the colourful and vibrant video alongside the many other characters that create a gamelike feel to the app. 

The in-app recap experience has grown each year to include a range of personalisation points: 

• Range of language lessons completed; 

• Average lesson accuracy percentage; 

• What percentile of top learners they fall into; 

• Amount of ‘XP’ earned (experience points); 

• Total amount of minutes spent language learning; 

• Total amount of words and sentences learned;  

• Longest learning streak;  

• The ‘league’ of learning they have reached this year. 

This campaign is a great example of how a company has used performance metrics and consumer feedback to their advantage. In 2020, DuoLingo realised that users loved to share their ‘XP percentile ranking’ from their early Year in Review campaigns. So, they added this comparison statistic to the following year’s share card, which resulted in increased share rates for their 2021 campaign. Let that be your reminder to analyse the performance metrics of your year-in-review campaign to see improved engagement results year after year! 

Monzo's Year in Monzo

In 2019, Monzo showed that even the finance industry can tackle the challenge of a year-in-review by presenting customers with a recap of their expenses from the past 12 months. Their campaign ran consecutively as a #YearInMonzo in-app video for two years in a row, where they included a range of statistics to highlight spending habits and top places where Monzo users like to shop, eat and be entertained.  

Some of these included: 

• A pie chart of how much money was spent for eating out, shopping, entertainment, groceries & more; 

• Number of times people used their Monzo card; 

• Amount of online transactions vs in-person transactions per month; 

• No.1 place where money was spent; 

• Top spots for eating out, shopping, and groceries; 

• How many spending pots were created; 

• How many payments were sent and received between friends.  

To embrace the inevitable differing opinions of a financial Year in Review, Monzo showcased tweets from their customers expressing their dread for receiving their wrap-up as the introduction to their 2020 #YearInMonzo announcement video.  

Then of course, the cost-of-living crisis came along at the end of 2021, and Monzo felt it would be inappropriate to deliver a Year in Review campaign at a time where finance was a sensitive topic for many.

Monzo’s made a statement to address why #YearInMonzo would not go ahead in 2022: 

“The main reason is simply that we didn’t feel like a spending-focussed campaign felt like the right thing to do at a time when people’s finances are more stretched than ever (it wouldn’t be a welcome reminder for many). And the #YearInMonzo campaign in particular relies on a very specific light-hearted approach that seemed a bit off.” - Monzo’s Social Media Manager. 

Will Monzo return to their #YearInMonzo in 2023?  

Conclusion  

No matter your company’s size, industry, or target audience, creating a year-in-review video is one of the most adaptive and effective ways to engage your audience and keep your brand top-of-mind as they enter the new year. 

If you need some extra inspiration, take a look at our 2023 ‘Unwrapped’ demo videos below:  

• YOUR 2023 UNWRAPPED: MINDFULNESS APPS EDITION 
• YOUR 2023 UNWRAPPED: FITNESS APPS EDITION
  

To take your customers into the next year with a personalised year-in-review video, contact us at hello@videosmart.com.