i3 - January/February 2016 - 91

CM s

OF THE FUTURE

JEFF LEVICK

chief revenue officer at Spotify

he CMO of the
future has to be
a little bit of a
mad scientist,"

says Spotify's Jeff Levick. The
music streaming service's
chief revenue officer, who
built a career at Google and
AOL, says the era of broad
campaigns is over. Instead,
winning CMOs must express their brand to
many different audiences.

Spotify," Levick says.
The digitization of music doesn't just help consumers connect with more relevant ads. It allows people to more fully
and elegantly integrate music into every part of their lives.
"It would be economically impossible to acquire 30 million tracks and then try to organize it yourself and find the
things that you like," says Levick. "That just never existed in
music."
"Because we have this catalog to work with and we have
interesting data behind it in terms of what people are
listening to or not, that allows us to present consumers with
more music, and more music that might be relevant to that
moment."

T H E S O U N DT R AC K TO YO U R
LIFE

"The expectations and demands from conAn alternate title
sumers are only getting greater," says Levick.
By leveraging its listening data, Spotify can
"They're shying away from irrelevant comdeliver music based not just on traditional
for 'CMO' in the future:
munications to them because that's all they're
genre, but on the reasons a user wants
Chief Customer
getting. But they're responding incredibly
to listen: improving their commute, for
well to brands that know how to speak to
instance,
or hosting a dinner party. For
Happiness Officer
them. And that's what the mad scientist will
the average user, the summation of those
be great at-understanding how to create mesmoments comes to 160 minutes of Spotify
sages that reach these audiences with relevance."
listening per day. The company's C Space disLevick says that at Spotify, digital audio and
play at CES 2016, which includes a living room,
data promise new ways to achieve that relevance,
a treadmill and gaming zones, will tell the story of
as technology enables unprecedented opportunities for
how music is woven into users' lives.
engagement.
"What Spotify did was take the entire collection of
"We think that there really hasn't been innovation in
recorded music and put it inside of an app," says Levick.
audio as a format in a very long time. Mainly because it
"That's an amazing first step. The second step is how can
was one-dimensional radio-there was no interaction or
you program your life with music?"
engagement mechanism. But with digital audio, you have
And what about looking twenty steps ahead? To borthe opportunity to actually speak to someone."
row a phrase from Google, what is Spotify's moonshot? "I
think the moonshot for us is that we'll take even more of the
thinking out of content discovery. Spotify will present you
C O N T E N T I N T E G R AT I O N
with the best content experience for the exact moment that
you're in," Levick says.
Levick foresees a world in which Nike, for example, would
In essence, Spotify wants to become the ever-present
serve useful audio content to a consumer about to exercise.
soundtrack to every user's life story. That's no easy task-but
"Instead of saying 'go buy my sneaker,' what if Nike ran an
Levick's career in tech gives him reason to be optimistic.
ad with one of their top Olympic athlete runners and said
"Things that seemed impossible just become possible.
'we want to give you a 30 second tip on how to make this the
Everything that you thought couldn't be done can be done.
best run of your life...by the way, our sneakers make you run
That's what really amazing about tech is that today's proba little faster.'
lems will be solved eventually, whether that's a year from
"That's the kind of thing you can do with digital audio
now or five years from now."
that you can't do in an analog world and that's where we
Those mad scientists had better get to work.
really see the innovation of storytelling coming together on
C TA . t e c h / i 3

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

http://www.spotify.com http://CTA.tech/i3

i3 - January/February 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of i3 - January/February 2016