Has Spotify ever described your musical taste as “yacht rock coastal grandmother” or “divorced dad hipster”?
Even if Spotify’s very specific-sounding labels don’t exactly describe who you are, they probably accurately capture the vibe of your listening habits – and help explain why its daily personalized playlists and its annual Wrapped listening summaries are so popular.
But although the vibes might be good, Spotify’s off-the-wall audience buckets don’t easily translate into targetable segments for advertisers. You won’t find “patient nervous vampire” in the IAB’s audience taxonomy, for example.
That’s where Katie English, Spotify’s global head of ad product, and this week’s guest on AdExchanger Talks, comes in.
English has been a driving force behind the company’s evolving ad tech stack, including its self-serve ad manager and its SSP, the Spotify Ad Exchange. She explains how these tools translate Spotify’s insights into standard audience segments that can be bought across programmatic platforms. And she recounts the lessons Spotify has learned adapting its systems to the ways advertisers prefer to buy.
“For us, showing up and being good partners means understanding what is it that you need from our ads API, what is it that you need from a data perspective,” English says. “We want to make sure that we are giving agencies the flexibility and the tooling they need to either buy us in their DSP of choice or use our API to integrate Spotify into their automated workflows in a very natural way.”
But English shares more than just a Wrapped-style recap of Spotify’s past year. She also previews where the platform is heading and teases new ad formats, like revamped sponsored playlists.
And English dishes on Spotify’s AI philosophy, as AI-generated music and podcasts grow more prevalent online – including whether Spotify believes AI-generated content is safe for brands and advertisers.
Also in this episode: How Spotify is monetizing its growing video catalog; proving performance for audio ads; what DSPs want from their platform partners; and how musicians and podcasters are the original “influencers.”
