I often wonder how it is possible that my Spotify ads are so off the mark. Nothing they advertise appeals to me, and the truth is that in all the years I have been on the platform, nothing ever has — so, obviously, I have never “clicked the banner”. What a failure.
At first I thought ads were there to show users things they might like (how naive of me), and that in these days of user monitoring, data collection and profile reconstruction, the suggestions would be accurate. They were not, in my case. It was hard to drift that far from my musical taste, but it was happening and it was starting to annoy me.
Later I thought it could not be a mistake on their side, and that — as with formula radio — artists would pay to be played in a specific slot. I welcomed that explanation with open arms because it gave meaning to a situation that had none, and put an end to this odd affair, so my head could rest again… although if I was clearly not the target audience (nor the perfect one) for those artists, why would they invest even a minimum of effort in a commercial action that would obviously not work? Does Spotify not identify and classify its users? Impossible!
On the radio you start from a general idea of a show or station’s audience, but on Spotify you can identify users one by one. So while on the radio an ad is broadcast according to the time slot and programme that looks interesting to the advertiser (almost by intuition), and it may or may not work for part of the audience — because one message is sent to many receivers — on Spotify you can do it to each of them in a personalised way. So it stopped making sense again.
So why does this happen? Why do advertisers choose so badly which profiles to play on? Why is advertising on Spotify so poorly targeted?
Well, it probably is not. Remember that Spotify is an established company with a business model that has turned the record industry upside down — if not backed it into a corner — shaking that old dinosaur hard, so it would be very naive of me to think they were doing it wrong. There had to be a reason.
And I found it.
To me, this advertising of tiresome artists is aimed, and very well, at two main goals: 1) the traditional one, that is, promoting artists who pay for presence, and 2) generating discomfort so that the saturation leads you to pay for a premium subscription that frees you from ads. Mystery solved.
As always, we tend to think technology is at our service, and we swallow a big lie, because we should not forget that it is at the service of whoever pays for it. As they say, “that’s the market, my friend”.
I may not have discovered anything new, and you may have asked yourself all of this before, but for me it was a revelation. I am left with one reflection and one doubt for the future: the first is that if something looks poorly designed, you are not looking at it from the right perspective; the doubt is whether people who listen to these artists for pleasure receive annoying ads from the world of rock or jazz.
Finally, if anyone from Spotify lands here and reads this, let’s grab a coffee and talk. I find the topic fascinating, and Spotify has all my admiration.