Blogs, Insights

The Wrapped-ification of the internet

By Callum Watts, Account Manager

Everyone loves stats, everyone loves music, and everyone loves themselves. So when Spotify introduced ‘Spotify Wrapped’ a decade ago, which provided everyone with stats about the music they listened to that year, it became a much-loved annual tradition.

As a marketing strategy, Spotify Wrapped was a slam dunk. The app encourages users to share their results on social media, so Instagram and Snapchat were full of Spotify branded, stylized imagery. In 2018, The Atlantic described it as a ‘masterful coup of free advertising’ – a campaign which has been rolled out, almost unchanged, for close to a decade.

Fast followers

By now, many businesses have piled in on the action, all of whom have their own annual slide shows of fun trends and insightful figures. While these businesses will all like to believe they’ve built something unique, most are essentially notes on what is now a well-played theme.

While these dupes are broadly harmless, many come across as either bizarre or – perhaps worse – boring. Many users are left wondering why they need to know their ‘Uber Personality’ (Culture Seeker, Paw-Rent and Corporate Cutie were three such types, if you were curious). While someone might be interested in discovering how many times they listened to their favorite song in just 365 days, they may not be so thrilled to discover they’re in this year’s top 1% of a supermarket’s Plain Ham Sandwich buyers.

Year in Monzo

Ridicule for the practice has gained steam in the last few years as fatigue for the format has set in – some years even Spotify themselves receive backlash over lackluster entries. But negative sentiment has been galvanized by Monzo’s attempt at piggybacking on the tradition earlier this year, when a user of the online bank escalated a complaint to the UK financial ombudsman for offensively commenting on how she chose to spend her money.

While media outlets reporting on Year in Monzo have focused on the official complaint, many others took to social media to air their own dissatisfaction with the bank’s strangely sarcastic wrap-up through the years. Users who frequently used their Monzo card at hardware retailers were labeled ‘Complete Tools’. Those that spent on streaming services were told they ‘banished boredom – and [their] life goals’, which many felt crossed into moral judgement of how users chose to spend their time and money. One Reddit user described the wrap-up as ‘kicking us while we’re down’.

Even more seriously – and what led to the formal complaint against the Ombudsman – was Year in Monzo’s commentary around food purchases. Users who spent money on food delivery services were described as using these apps ‘more than most’, and accused them of possessing an ‘unused oven’. These users were told ‘mostly, you fast-fooded’. For a society that is becoming increasingly aware of the sensitivities many have around eating and their weight – including those with eating disorders –this shaming language has come across as being shockingly tone deaf.

Lessons

The existence of Year in Monzo was a disaster waiting to happen. Broadly speaking, a wrap-up is a procedurally generated marketing tool. While the personalisation this facilitates is its great strength, it also comes with serious reputational risk when a brand is speaking intimately with its users about their personal data when they can’t be alive to the sensitivities at play in each individual case.

While weighing up this risk works for many brands, it seems that others haven’t taken a step back to appreciate what they are – and what their audience needs them to be. While Monzo advertises itself as a product for young people and thus deploys the marketing tactics more commonly associated with fun-loving and ‘cheeky’ platforms like Spotify, in this case it seems to have forgotten that it’s a highly regulated financial services firm. Many of its users will want it to act as such. 

So, what’s next for the Wrapped-ificaiton of the internet? Monzo are unlikely to make the same mistake again, but doubtless others will stumble into the same faux pas they did. In all likeliness, businesses will slowly drop their Wrapped features from their annual marketing calendars as its novelty slowly wares off. It’ll be the end of an era, but I for one hope that the best of the bunch will survive – I will miss my ‘Top 5 artists’ of the year if Spotify does choose to bring their Wrapped to a close.

If you’re looking for advice about initiatives to support your business which align with your brand instead of following the fads, get in touch. We’re at info@farrerkane.com.