Monday Briefing: Spotify Wrapped Is Marketing's Master Class

Good morning, it's James here. It's the week between Christmas and New Year's, that strange limbo where time doesn't exist and half your inbox is on auto-reply. Perfect time to reflect on 2025 and think about what's coming. Let's get into it.

(Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

The Lead: Spotify Wrapped Wins Again, And There's a Playbook in It

Every December, Spotify reminds us what genius marketing looks like. And 2025 was their most impressive execution yet.

What happened: Spotify Wrapped 2025 hit 200 million active users in its first 24 hours, a 19% jump from last year. The campaign included 50 physical installations worldwide, from a giant paw on Rio's Copacabana Beach (celebrating Lady Gaga) to an 800-foot red hair cascade in New York's Union Square (for Chappell Roan). The new "Listening Age" feature, which estimates your musical age based on when your top songs were released, generated over 116,000 social mentions alone (Meltwater).

Why CMOs should care: Spotify has cracked something most brands struggle with: making marketing not feel like marketing. They've turned user data into a gift people want to share. Companies implementing similar personalized year-end summaries report 41% higher engagement rates compared to traditional marketing (Spotify Newsroom).

The take: Wrapped works because it's about the user, not the brand. Every slide says "here's what makes you interesting," not "here's why Spotify is great." That's the difference between marketing people tolerate and marketing they spread for you. Most brands have the data to do this. Few have the restraint to let the customer be the hero. We love it so much we created our own Wrapped-style tool for Google Ads (check it out here).

What I'm Watching: 7 Trends That Will Define 2026

Year-end predictions are usually forgettable. But this year's crop has some substance. Marketing Week's analysis (read it here) lands on seven trends that deserve your attention:

1. GEO is the new SEO. Maybe. "Generative engine optimization" is getting attention, with 30% of UK searches now showing AI overviews (Ofcom). But here's the reality: this is still an unknown space. Click-through rates on AI-overviewed queries drop to 8% vs. 15% without (Pew Research via Search Engine Land), but the optimization playbook is unproven. My take: good SEO is likely good GEO. Be wary of snake oil salesmen selling "GEO strategies." But keep your eye on it. We know it's important.

2. Commerce media goes everywhere. Retail media is evolving into "commerce media," now spanning financial services, healthcare, and travel. Expected to hit $178.2 billion globally (WPP Media).

3. Agency consolidation reshapes the landscape. The Omnicom-IPG merger creates a $25 billion behemoth. Regulatory responses in 2026 will determine whether we see more mega-deals.

4. AI creative production accelerates. ITV and Channel 4 now enable AI-generated TV ads within minutes. One creative director put it bluntly: "We're going to see an absolute explosion."

5. Measurement finally gets serious. Only 39.2% of marketers currently measure business outcomes (Marketing Week). New cross-industry measurement platforms aim to change that.

6. Connected TV dominates. Linear TV ad spend has declined 33.1% since 2015 while online video grew 1,759.4% in the same period (Warc). The migration is accelerating.

7. Experiential makes a comeback. Despite digital growth, real-world event budgets are increasing. Major sporting events (FIFA World Cup, Women's T20) will drive 2026 investment.

By The Numbers

1%: The share of overall web traffic that AI platforms drive, despite their growing user bases (Digiday).

But here's the twist: users from AI tools convert at 1.66% for sign-ups compared to 0.15% from search and 0.46% from social. The traffic is tiny, but it's high-intent.

What this means: If you're only measuring volume, you're missing the story. AI referral traffic may be a rounding error today, but the audience quality is dramatically better. Start tracking it separately now, before your board asks why you missed the trend.

The Reading List

• "How the best marketing campaigns of 2025 navigated uncertain times": Marketing Dive's year-in-review. The winning formula: nostalgia + value + social-first. Chili's, American Eagle, and Dove all cracked it.

• "'A year of loose ends': Digiday editors share top takeaways from 2025": A candid look at what actually happened this year: the handoff from linear TV to streaming, cookie deprecation's slow death, and AI's messy reality.

• "Kantar Marketing Trends 2026": Kantar's annual predictions. The standout: brands using knowledge-sharing micro-communities achieved 25% higher marketing ROI in China. Something to watch.

• "The 21 Biggest CMO Shakeups of 2025": Adweek's comprehensive tracker of who moved where. Useful for benchmarking and trend-spotting in the C-suite.

Musical Chairs

Hormel Foods created a new enterprise-wide CMO role, filling it with Jason Levine from Mondelez, where he spent 19 years (Hormel Foods). The "enterprise-wide" framing suggests a bet on unified brand strategy.

Proofpoint hired Joyce Kim as CMO, pulling from Zscaler where she ran global marketing and communications (Proofpoint). Cybersecurity continues to attract top marketing talent.

One More Thing

The space between years is good for asking: what did I learn this year that I'll actually use next year? Most of what we consume disappears. The few insights that stick are worth identifying, and doubling down on.

Happy New Year. See you in 2026.

James