Spotify

The Power Of Audio: Audience Understanding

Exploring audio’s new era for consumers and brands alike...  

What’s That Sound?

Spotify briefed Crowd DNA to work on the Power Of Audio – a trailblazing thought leadership study investigating, and celebrating, the role of sound in our lives, and what the future holds in store.

It’s no surprise that Spotify takes audio very seriously. It needs to know how, when and why people are listening, and what the new audio moments are. It also needs to help brands understand sound and how it can become a more effective part of the marketing mix.

Deprivation Methods

The fieldwork was significant, covering three continents and involving over 40 hours of interviews, with subject matter extending from music and podcasts, to voice activation and sonic branding.

We worked with 46 consumers in the US, UK, Brazil and Japan, conducting audio diary tasks (including deprivation phases), Skype interviews to dig deeper and filmed ethnographic sessions to truly build empathy around use cases and need states. We discovered a huge amount about people’s audio moments (singing in the shower among them!), how audio is used for mood control and the powerful recognition of brand sounds.

Key Points Of Focus

1: What is the power of audio?
2: What makes music special?
3: What makes spoken word special?
4: What is the creative opportunity in audio?
5: What is the future of audio?

The Expert View

Running in tandem was our work with experts – 14 in total, ranging from artists and producers, to academics, marketing heads, innovators, advertising consultants and content producers. Each of them provided a fresh perspective on why audio matters so much. Themes explored included audio and memory, audio’s role in next generation marketing and the power of the podcast.

Landing The Story

With the work first launched at the high profile industry event, the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, 2017, outputs created by Crowd DNA’s Socialise team included image galleries and series of broadcast quality films (sizzle, main film and theme specific) that editorialised this thought leadership work in an accessible and narrative-led way.

A 15-minute documentary, plus theme-specific edits
A 15-minute documentary, plus theme-specific edits

 

All shot using broadcast quality cameras
All shot using broadcast quality cameras

 

Featuring experts and hero participants across three continents.
Featuring experts and hero participants across three continents.

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.