Stream­ing music giant Spo­ti­fy has just appoint­ed Droga5 to take care of its cre­ative duties, with a view to broad­en­ing its appeal from tech and music loy­al­ists to a more main­stream audience.

Droga5’s stratos­pher­ic success

It’s some­times hard to remem­ber that Droga5, now one of the most suc­cess­ful U.S. adver­tis­ing agen­cies, is a rel­a­tive new­com­er to the indus­try, hav­ing been launched in 2006 by its founder and cre­ative chair­man, David Dro­ga. Since then, it’s won a glit­ter­ing array of awards, includ­ing six Cannes Lions, TED Ads “Worth Spread­ing” Award, and an Art Direc­tors Hall of Fame Award for Dro­ga himself.

Erin Clift, Spotify’s VP of Glob­al Mar­ket­ing and Part­ner­ships, explained her firm’s rea­son­ing in mak­ing the selection:

“We’re very excit­ed to work with Droga5. They are incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed, under­stand our goals and are pas­sion­ate about Spotify…and are the per­fect part­ner to help us con­nect music with a broad, main­stream audience.”

The new cam­paign: some edu­cat­ed guesses

The details of the new campaign’s roll­out are being kept under wraps by both Spo­ty 5 and Droga5, much to the frus­tra­tion of the inquis­i­tive adver­tis­ing copy­writer or account man­ag­er. But those in the know – exec­u­tives famil­iar with the campaign’s aims – it seems a fair bet that the agency will start work on a mul­ti-plat­form cam­paign that will include TV ads and will prob­a­bly run beyond the U.S. into oth­er glob­al markets.

The selec­tion of Droga5 marks the first occa­sion that the firm has appoint­ed an ad agency and comes just a cou­ple of months after it announced a revamp of its plat­form. Now that may just have been the prompt to seek out an agency: accord­ing to Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, only 1 mil­lion of its 5 mil­lion pay­ing cus­tomers are from the U.S.  With the refreshed plat­form, the firm seems to have decid­ed that a new mar­ket­ing pro­gram was in order, one that aimed to build aware­ness among U.S. poten­tial subscribers.

And they’ve cho­sen an ad agency with impres­sive form to help them achieve their growth ambi­tions. Last year, Droga5’s U.S. rev­enue soared by 43 per cent, tak­ing the total to an esti­mat­ed $41 mil­lion. The agency now includes on its ros­ter brands like Kraft, Hen­nessey, Pru­den­tial, Coca Cola (it han­dles the Coke Zero and Diet Coke brands), New­cas­tle, and, more recent­ly, Amer­i­can Express.