I got this question last week from one of our ad clients. He'd just read a "study" (designed and published by Spotify) claiming to find that Marquee, one of Spotify's own advertising tools, was a way better and cheaper form of promotion than social ads of the sort he'd been running with us.
To quote Spotify: "The study showed that Marquee delivers an average of 10x more Spotify listeners for every dollar spent on similar social ads."
"Is this true?" he wanted to know.
Yeah, no. I call BS.
I'll explain why below.
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First, a quick definition of terms.
Marquee is an ad placement from Spotify that takes over a user's app screen. It looks something like this:
This is the bigger of the two ad placements Spotify currently offers (the other one is Showcase), and in my experience, it's the more effective.
But it's also more exclusive. First, it's only for new releases. And second, while Spotify has changed the requirements several times, the current documentation says you need 5,000 monthly listeners in a target market (meaning in a single country) to launch a campaign. That's a decent bar to entry, and my guess is that it probably disqualifies most of you.
The term social ads, on the other hand, denotes an incredibly broad category of promotion. (I have a hunch the ambiguity of the term is part of the problem with Spotify's "study" – more on that in a second). But it includes basically any time you pay a platform like Meta or TikTok or Google to get your content shown to more people.
So, with that said...
Is Marquee really 10x better than social ads?
Short answer: No way in hell.
Longer answer (you guessed it): It depends, because there are about a bajillion different sorts of social ads, and their effectiveness varies a ton depending on which sort you're using and what you're using them for.
And that's really the crux of why Spotify's "study" was bogus: You absolutely can run social ads that will horribly underperform Marquee, and it appears that that's exactly what Spotify did.
In a self-proclaimed attempt to create an "apples to apples" comparison, Spotify tried to replicate the settings of Marquee in their social ads:
- They didn't expand audiences
- They only targeted Marquee-eligible countries
- They set similar budgets
Etc.
In other words, they made other social platforms play by Spotify's rules – but the best way to run any ad campaign is to play by the rules of its platform. Meta ads, for instance, work best when you follow Meta's own guidelines; of course they'll underperform if you superimpose Spotify's guidelines on top of Meta.
And this is to say nothing of the main part of any social ad campaign: the ads themselves. Bad social ads perform badly. Unfortunately (and this is both a point against Spotify's study and a point in Marquee's favor) it's easier than not to make bad ads.
I'd say the main lesson to take from Spotify's study is that you really shouldn't trust a company to run a study of its own product.
But, with that said, the question still stands:
Should you use Marquee?
For most of you, the answer is no. Here's why:
- You probably can't, since you probably don't have enough listeners in a single country. Sorry. But don't worry, because...
- In my own testing, I've found that good social ads still lick Marquee in cost per listener. A really good Marquee campaign might get a CPR of $0.30 or $0.40, and most are higher. Good social ads can halve that.
- Social ads have both a deeper and broader reach – broader in that it's much easier to reach new audiences, and deeper in that they do more for your brand. Instagram ads, for instance, drive Instagram followers, post engagement, and Spotify streams, while Marquee only does the last.
But Marquee does have two solid benefits:
- The campaign flow is so basic that it's super hard to screw up. You can run bad social ads and see zero results; I'm not sure you could get zero results on Marquee if you tried.
- Marquee hits a different listener segment than social ads: the people who use Spotify but aren't on, say, TikTok.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that Marquee makes for a nice supplementary advertising tool. If you have a budget over $1,000, then you might consider spending 10-20% of your money on it.
But it almost certainly shouldn't be the go-to tool in your toolbox.
Then again, I run social advertising campaigns for a living, so take my opinion with a healthy dose of skepticism. Like Spotify, I'm incredibly biased, too. Just in the opposite (and obviously correct) direction.
– Jon
Jon Anderson
Founder @ Two Story Media
Surprisingly Bad @ Being Unbiased
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100% Human Guarantee
I wrote this, not AI.
Today's random photo: There was a small spider crawling up and down this plant when I sat next to it. I tried to ignore it (spiders have their own kind of goodness), but it kept descending uncomfortably close to my hand on its little string, and I just got a napkin and now the spider is no more and I am carrying the guilt of its killing.
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P.S. – In last week's newsletter, I complained about how awful it is to be a curator. You can read it here.
P.P.S. – I should probably mention that, if you're interested in growing your social and streaming profiles, we currently have one slot open for a new Meta ads client. (We normally work with 20 artists per month and right now we're at 19.)
Working with an agency is not for everyone. But if it's for you, here's the link to apply.