Spotify's Wrapped campaign has become a yearly tradition eagerly anticipated by millions of users worldwide. It began in 2016, and every year since, this innovative marketing campaign has built upon itself, leveraging personalized data to recap users' listening habits over the past year. The campaign's success lies in creating a deeply personal and shareable experience, turning data into storytelling that captures the zeitgeist through motion design.

The Role of Motion Design in "Wrapped"

In 2013, Spotify launched A Year in Music or essentially Wrapped beta. Like Wrapped, A Year in Music leveraged data to show users the songs they played the most and the hours they spent listening. This continued through 2015, utilizing graphics Time called “on brand but not as kitschy as they are today.”

Source: Ad Age

Access to this lightly stylized data felt novel and exciting, but the campaign didn’t actually go viral until it was revamped in 2017 with personalized listening stats and interactivity, or as Vox puts it, “the customizable, jazzy graphic release” we recognize today.

Source: Spotify Community

The success of 2017 Wrapped did not slow Spotify down; taking queues from the year prior, the team doubled down with a highly cohesive, interactive campaign in 2018 that used motion design to transform static data into captivating and dynamic visuals.

Source: Spotify Wrapped 2018 on Behance

In 2019, Wrapped introduced A Decade Wrapped, which included shareable social-ready graphics for the first time. In just the first week after launch, more than 60 million users engaged with the in-app story experience.

Source: Spotify For the Record

It was an impactful and fitting end to the 2010s, marking a pivot toward thinking social first because, as we now know, social conversation and connection are integral parts of the Wrapped experience. To be social first, you need a strong sense of digital and cultural literacy. Motion design is the perfect medium to host that convergence.

In 2021, Spotify’s Global Head of Brand Design Rasmus Wangelin explained that as a digital-first company, Spotify is always thinking about how to create impactful work across all of its digital touchpoints and emphasized that “motion is always a key part of our design.”

Source: Spotify Engineering

Read more: 5 Reasons Why Motion is Essential to Your Brand in 2024

Jump forward a few years, and motion design is the heartbeat of Spotify's Wrapped campaign. This is exemplified by the Spotify team’s commitment to expressive storytelling and continued reassertion of the important role that motion plays. Every year, the team works hard to raise the bar.

In 2022, the theme was self-expression and play. The team introduced a ton of “overlapping and interlocking shapes” and then worked with Hornet to bring the monograms to life.

Source: Spotify Design

“We wanted to bring to the forefront that we’re all unique. The monograms are going to do that to a certain extent, but motion is really going to bring that home. All the shapes have their own motion language as well.” - Rasmus Wangelin

Source: Spotify Design

That same year, the Spotify team decided to expand their creative toolkit to deliver the best user experience across digital touchpoints. To do this, they used Lottie animations to increase their creative flexibility and “lead Wrapped to a place it had not been before.”

UX Motion Designer Ade Omole explained how using Lottie animation over native allows for more “fluid and flexible animations within the product” as it puts control of the animation in the hands of the design team, as opposed to relying on engineering for implementation. This is also why Fable supports exporting to Lottie.

Learn more: What is Lottie Animation?

Omole excitedly shared, “Being able to successfully get this into the hands of millions of Spotify users completely blows the door open for more dynamic and complex animations in 2023 Wrapped! We hardly scratched the surface.”

This brings us to the latest campaign, 2023 Wrapped, which we’ll explore in a little more detail later on.

Key Features of the Wrapped Motion Design

The motion design in Wrapped is characterized by several key features:

1. Personalization: Each user's Wrapped experience is tailored to their listening habits, making the content highly personalized and engaging. Stories like 2021’s Audio Aura or 2023’s Me in 2023 are “fun to riff on with design.” Year to year, the team develops design systems to inform how your data transforms into motion so that each expression feels truly your own.

2. Interactivity: Spotify prioritizes interactivity throughout the year, but no singular feature is as popular as Wrapped. Through increasingly creative frameworks like Sound Town, which highlights the city with the most similar taste profile to yours, users explore different facets of their music year, expressed in motion.

3. Visual Appeal: Bright colors, smooth animations, and trendy graphics are used to create an energetic experience that enhances the year’s theme and resonates in the cultural moment.

4. Shareability: Wrapped introduced Instagram-ready, shareable graphics in 2019 and never looked back. These graphics, while often static, are an extension of the motion design, an extension of the narrative.

These features enhance user engagement and provide unique marketing insights into running a marketing campaign that resonates with a target audience.

The Impact of Motion Design on Virality

There’s a reason Spotify continually enhances its focus on the motion aspect of Wrapped. In addition to its storytelling value, motion design significantly contributes to the campaign's virality. The dynamic visuals and personalized content make it fun for users to watch and share their Wrapped stories, leading to widespread social media engagement.

This not only boosts Spotify's brand visibility but also attracts new users who want to be part of the experience. The campaign's success is a testament to how effective motion design can be in creating viral marketing campaigns.

Part of its genius is that it creates FOMO, which “inherently entices new users to consider Spotify, so it’s a flywheel effect,” explains June Sauvaget, Spotify’s global head of consumer and product marketing. Additionally, those new users may switch from competitors like Apple Music just to participate in the yearly phenomenon.

And so, what began as an out-of-the-box marketing idea that set Spotify apart has since become a co-opted strategy. Companies like Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music, Duolingo, and more have observed the yearly craze and its resulting impact and created their own versions of the campaign in hopes of generating comparable free publicity.

Still, Spotify continues to stand out from the crowd with its dynamic storytelling, shareable features, and thoughtful execution. It’s that hyper-specific, narrative-based, and thematic yearly encapsulation of data and culture when paired with the social exchange, that makes Wrapped the beloved free advertising campaign that it is.

Read more: 10 Major Brands Driving Seasonal Sales with Motion Design

Case Study: 2023 "Wrapped" Campaign

The 2023 Wrapped campaign was one of Spotify's most successful yet. The team was more committed than ever to elevating their game. It went live in a “whopping 170 markets and 35+ languages.” It featured new interactive elements and more sophisticated animations that captivated users. According to Spotify, the campaign saw a 25% increase in shares compared to the previous year, demonstrating the power of continual innovation in motion design. The 2023 campaign also introduced unique marketing strategies, such as collaboration with popular artists and influencers, further amplifying its reach.

The mission: to maximize impact while optimizing and adapting their technology to include the web. Senior Engineer Zela Taino and the team knew where to focus. “Our attention turned to a crucial aspect of Wrapped, one that enhances the narrative and adds vibrancy to our data stories — the animations.”

How did they push the envelope?

To power the 2023 campaign, Spotify opted to blend native and Lottie-built animations.

The native builds were used for data visualizations and interactions. This included view and layer transformations, path manipulation, textures (e.g., gradients and blurs), and variables (e.g., localized text, images, and listening data to dictate appearance, color, motion, etc.).

Source: Spotify Engineering

The Lottie builds were used for generic animations that didn’t require parameterization. Think brand visuals and high keyframe animations (@engineers, phew). In practice, Lottie also helped reduce redundancies and increase autonomous iteration.

Source: Spotify Engineering

With this technological innovation, came a Wrapped chock-full of new data stories, all built to the theme: “realest Wrapped ever.” Inspired by early internet expressions, crafted through a modern lens, the 2023 campaign is chaotic and vibrant and arguably (callback) kitschy.

Source: Spotify Newsroom

“The strategic adoption of Lottie, coupled with native animations, showcased a synthesis of efficiency and creativity. The lessons learned will guide our future steps, ensuring that Spotify Wrapped continues to push boundaries, captivate audiences and evolve at the intersection of technology and imagination.” - Zela Taino

Future of "Wrapped"

Looking ahead, the future of Spotify's "Wrapped" campaign promises even more innovation. With advancements in technology and data analytics, Spotify can further personalize the experience and introduce new interactive features. From Audio Aura in 2021 to Listening Personality in 2022 to Sound Town in 2023, it's clear that there’s plenty to look forward to, as long as you’re cool with some light data mining. As Spotify continues to push the boundaries of what's possible when data meets motion, the Wrapped campaign will likely remain a cornerstone of its marketing strategy.

“Animations add life to the Wrapped campaign…” - Zela Taino

In case you’re not set up to receive and share your very own Wrapped this year, don’t worry — it’s not too late. There’s already an article on how to view your Wrapped in 2024 (five months from now).

Read more: How to See Spotify Wrapped

Conclusion

Spotify's "Wrapped" campaign exemplifies how effective motion design can elevate a brand's marketing efforts. By transforming data into captivating stories, Spotify creates a unique and engaging user experience that resonates with millions. The campaign's success highlights the importance of innovative design in marketing and sets a benchmark for future campaigns. As the digital landscape evolves, brands can look to "Wrapped" as a prime example of how to leverage motion design to create impactful and viral marketing campaigns.

Start animating your next viral campaign with Fable now.