Spotify’s head of global marketing, Louisa Ferguson, has described this year’s Wrapped as the “realest” so far, despite something about 2023 feeling “especially chaotic” with regards to how people consumed culture.

This week, the online streaming platform launched its Wrapped personalised user experience with new interactive features to help fans celebrate their year on the app, alongside a creative marketing campaign across OOH, digital social and on-platform across 31 markets.

“We wanted to acknowledge that feeling because it felt very accurate to 2023,” Ferguson said.

“Amidst all this, we realised that “your Wrapped doesn’t lie.” The data is real. And so we leaned into creating the realest Wrapped ever.”

According to Ferguson, who has been with the company since 2020, this year’s Wrapped campaign has been the biggest campaign it has delivered with individual statistics being created for millions of users across 170 markets and in over 35 languages.

She continued: “We started the year with Playlist in a Bottle and were overwhelmed by the positive user response. We expanded the My Top Five franchise. We also developed a genre-based experience called “Find Your Flow.”

“These experiences represent a new way of thinking about marketing and product at Spotify and there’s more coming after Wrapped, which I won’t give away just yet.”

“Wrapped is the capstone of what has been an incredibly delightful year of Spotify interactive experiences,” she added.

“Originally, we believed these experiences needed to be short and sweet. But we’ve found that there’s a cohort of fans that want to go a level deeper. They want to engage. This was exciting because it inspired us to do even more data-rich, complicated experiences.

“We also learned that market nuances matter, and for Wrapped, these learnings just reinforced the need to think critically about global versus local campaign executions.”

Spotify’s global marketing boss also revealed the streaming platform has plans to launch “tons of events” around the world to “celebrate the year in music”, which will be complemented by out-of-home experiences with interactive components.

She said: “We’ll also reveal our top artist through a special billboard moment in several cities across the world.

“I think what’s become wonderful about our Wrapped celebration for the global top artist in particular is that it’s given us permission to deliver special experiences for fans.”

“Some of our coolest, craziest work comes from those collaborations. Critically, it’s a celebration for the fans as much as the artist. We’re able to recognise both and celebrate the achievement,” she concluded.