When Spotify Wrapped rolls around, everyone’s stories are the same, but somehow they’re all different. With a launch in 170 global markets in over 35 languages, it’s hard to deny that the campaign is social media’s biggest year-end celebration. Lauren Ferreira, Global Group Creative Director at Spotify, takes us on the inside — sharing some of the creative strategy that makes Wrapped feel magically tuned-in to every single listener.

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What is your title and describe your current role at Spotify?

Global Group Creative Director. I lead creative for North America and this year I led the global creative team in the campaign for 2023 Wrapped.

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What was your path to your current role? How did you get your start?

I came up as a creative at ad agencies. My last agency role was as a Creative Director at Droga5 in New York. Most recently, I was a Creative Director at Media Arts Lab, leading multi-disciplinary teams on popular, global consumer tech products like AirPods. This was a natural bridge to working on the brand side.

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As someone with both a writing and design background, how do you see the relationship between the two in the creative process?

As a Creative Director, it’s helpful to have a background in both. It’s more tools at your disposal to help fix something when it needs surgery. But more importantly, it helps you focus on setting the vision for the work without hyper-focusing on the particulars.

Here’s an example. The creative strategy behind 2023 Wrapped was all about keeping it real. So my focus, along with my team, was to guide us towards that creative north star without being prescriptive. Design brought realness to life through visuals that felt very expressive, beautifully imperfect, not sterile or fake. The creative team took things a step farther by charting how this year’s top streamed songs correlated with data in the real world. Like graphing the streams of “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus alongside the sales of flower bouquets in real life.

Or the streams of “Kill Bill” by SZA alongside the decline in popularity of the name Bill. On social, this meant creating a suite of films that celebrated not just the year’s top songs, but the way they made us feel—because after all, you can’t fake a feeling. In media, it meant leaning into 3D OOH and CGI objects that interacted with the real world —for the first time in Wrapped. The point being, if you focus on a clear creative north star, it helps inform every decision you make—these relationships become symbiotic.

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Spotify Wrapped combines copywriting, design and massive amounts of data to create a highly-personalized, undeniably fun final product. How do the teams collaborate, and what is your role in steering that project?

Wrapped requires hundreds of people with different expertise in 170+ markets across a dozen time zones. My team was tasked with landing a global idea that had a sharp point of view to be easily executable across markets but ALSO was universal enough that it could also be relevant and resonate everywhere. This required an unbelievable team of cross-functional collaborators across brand, strategy, comms, artist and partnerships, marketing, media, product, design, creative and many more.

Basically in the beginning of the project, my team and I operated kind of like a sourdough starter. Then at the end, more like duct tape. Making it all make sense creatively as one cohesive and compelling story. I realize that’s a weird visual.

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What factors do you consider when evolving the creative for Spotify Wrapped year to year? How do you lovingly evolve it?

Retain the things people love and look forward to, but also make it feel new and original. After all, Wrapped is a reflection of the year in listening, so it evolves as culture evolves.

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What was the foundational strategy or concept behind this year's campaign? Any interesting insights or storytelling that drove the work?

2023 Spotify Wrapped was all about celebrating the real, the realer and the realest listening moments that defined this year. It’s the receipts of what really happened.

“Wrapped or It Didn’t Happen” was some language we used to tease this idea. It hits on the insight that if it’s happening in culture, it’s happening on Spotify.

In OOH, it was more a job of curation—getting out of the way and letting the creativity of Spotify listeners speak for us. I particularly loved discovering that the top song on Valentine’s Day in 2023 was “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” by PinkPanthress, Ice Spice. Or that “Sure Thing” by Miguel had more streams in Vegas than anywhere else in the country in 2023. It proves that Spotify can be a sort of almanac of how the world is feeling at any given time or place.

We also created a suite of social films with KingShe and their production team at Somesuch, which explored the spectrum of listening trends in 2023 on Spotify. We produced eight films in total which captured just that. The raw, authentic, visceral, even repressed feelings that music says out loud.

For example, sad music had a huge moment in 2023. But sad music as a vibe we're seeking, something that’s trending. So for this reason we made the film very colorful and playful, creating tears through multi-media like blue yarn and waterfalls, even editorially having the transitions be through the tear drops add to this aesthetic.

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What is the creative approach to making the OOH advertisements and activations feel unique to all 170 worldwide markets?

Understand the context. Know your audience. One of my favorite OOH pieces we did this year was an extreme horizontal at the Oculus in New York. We wanted to celebrate how - just like Shakespeare brought new words into the lexicon - some artists today are doing the same.

Ice Spice popularized the word and feeling of “Grrrah,” so to celebrate her we animated the word down the length of the Oculus stretching 280 feet. We added little to no context to the placement, knowing it would resonate with fans and quickly saw passersby capturing it on their socials.

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What do you want every user to feel when they open their Wrapped for the first time each year?

Spotify gets me.

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Is there a behind-the-scenes element of the 2023 Wrapped campaign that you’re particularly proud of and want people to see or better understand?

The team behind this work is made up of users of Spotify, not just marketers of Spotify. We’re fans too. Some of my favorite pieces of the campaign that involved the year’s leading artists were born from that belief.

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Now that Wrapped is wrapped, what's next for you and your team?

A long exhale. Maybe a nap inside a hollow tree. Then onto the next.