Who wants to sponsor the Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify? Anyone? Well, you can now do so in more markets. Shall we have a whip-round and buy the sponsorship rights for Switzerland? We could run a load of ads telling Spotify to "fuck off". That sounds like fun, right?
The streaming firm first started selling sponsorship around the Discover Weekly playlist on its free platform last year. After a pilot in the US, sponsors were signed up in the UK and Latin America. Now brands will be able to associate themselves with the weekly personalised list of streaming tracks in Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland and Turkey.
Says Spotify: "Recent data has revealed that Spotify listeners have streamed over 2.3 billion hours of their personalised Discover Weekly playlist between July 2019 and June 2020, showing that it continues to keep them engaged year after year. Now advertisers have the chance to sponsor this playlist and get their messages heard by millions across the globe".
Meanwhile, Spotify ad chief for the EMEA region, Rak Patel, adds, "Discover Weekly gives us, and any playlist sponsors, an opportunity to show users that we know them even better than they may know themselves. At Spotify we are focused on providing brands and advertisers with unique opportunities to engage with consumers, and the potential sponsorship of Discover Weekly really delivers against that".