Attribution, attribution, attribution: Spotify’s location-based playbook.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director
www.LopezMartiMiami.com/

• “I know that 50% of my advertising budget goes to waste. Problem is, I don’t know which 50%.”
• A phrase that belongs in the Cliché Hall of Fame*.
• It remains as relevant as ever nonetheless: attribution is the ultimate marker of advertising ROI.
• Attribution as in identifying which media outlets &/or touchpoints are more effective at obtaining your marketing objectives.
• Brand awareness, leads, acquisition, conversion, aided and unaided recall, purchase intent, etc, etc, etc.
• Attribution used to be an afterthought when the advertising toolbox was limited to five or six legacy outlets.
• Audiences were sitting ducks.
• Nowadays it is almost impossible to avoid being dragged into rollouts with a myriad moving parts.
• Good luck keeping it simple.
• The media landscape is an ever-deeper rabbit hole of complexity and fragmentation.
• Attribution is more critical than ever.
• “Our AI-powered programmatic model will optimize attribution for us”.
• Problem is, up to 60% of the metrics we buy from digital platforms are either inaccurate or outright fraudulent.
• To this day nobody knows what exactly YouTube considers a “view”**.
• First party data is the only way out of the labyrinth.
• Do you know who happens to think attribution is THE most important challenge marketers face today?
• Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek.
• Mr. Ek has double skin in the game: he sells ads to advertisers interested in engaging his subscriber base AND buys ads to maintain and expand said subscriber base.
• Here’s what he recommends.
• Let’s say you AB test ten different platforms to reach out to prospects.
• After careful comparison and consideration, you proceed to identify the three outlets that bring in the best results.
• While terminating efforts on the seven underperforming ones.
• Caution!
• Your three winners might change their algorithms overnight and you could end up empty-handed.
• Alphabet, Meta, Snap and TSNFKAT (the social network formerly known as Twitter) have done this several times.
• A serious headache for many a marketer &/or influencer.
• Listen to Spotify’s founder & CEO: when it comes to your marketing repertoire and funnel, keep your options open.
• Maintain a plan B, C & D, even if today they don’t look like much.
• You never know if Mark Zuckerberg is mulling a rug pull that could render your carefully crafted media plan useless in a matter of hours.
• Spotify is hardly a legacy company yet, oddly enough, Mr. Ek admits that good old word of mouth is still his best friend in the marketing toolbox.
• He has learned after years of trial and error that it takes no less than 8 recommendations from friends or peers for an individual to become a Spotify member.
• Verbal recommendations.
• Consequently, his company’s outreach is focused on high population density zip codes, namely college campuses.
• So.
• It’s inevitable.
• A sizable portion of our advertising stimuli will reach people who are not interested in our product or service and will not change their minds.
• There are no silver bullets.
• All we can do is hang in there and keep iterating.
• If it serves as consolation, let’s remember another quote by another famous businessman, Jim Simons, arguably the greatest stock trader of all time***, who said “we only need to be right 51% of the time”.
• It applies to Wall Street as much as it does to marketing: if you achieve your goals 51% of the time, the magic of compound interest will kick in.

*99% of clichéd phrases are attributed to either Winston Churchill or Henry Ford but this one in particular was coined, allegedly, to John Wanamaker, an American department store magnate from the 1900s.
** A YouTube view only counts if the user pressed play and watched for at least 30 seconds. Allegedly.
***Mr. Simons, one of the first “quants” (mathematicians) to descend upon Wall Street, famously never revealed the intricacies of his proprietary high-frequency trading model. Only senior employees of the company he founded, RenTech (Renaissance Technologies), have access to the code.