Spotify’s House Of Brands Play

As you may know I love podcasts, this week Spotify have officially acquired The Ringer here are some thoughts on why it makes a lot of a lot sense.

The New All Serving Ecosystem

Spotify now owns The Ringer (has a huge network), Parcast, Gimblet, Anchor, this means it is a real player in podcast creation, distribution and advertising. No one else in the space really has the active audience, offers the ability to create a podcast, distribute across multiple platforms and directly to Spotify, alongside a way to monetise it. This can be a huge growth investment and play.

🏈 🏀 ⚽️ ⚾️ = Addictive Listening = Constant Spending

Podcasts increased usage (listens) by 20% in Q4 2019, this is vitally important for a modern day tech brand. Sports podcasts are insanely popular and are created multiple times a week, the tribal nature of sports means that there will always be an opinion, they will always be teams and players that can be discussed or appear and all of this means a premium for advertising slots and sponsorship. Sports advertising is huge business, as can podcast hosts, the combination is going to enable more usage and bring in more ad revenue.
The Athletic were the first company to really understand the sports fan bundle (I support Arsenal, Watford, Barcelona, love MMA and tennis and enjoy NBA, so I will want multiple news services and sign up to journalists and team updates), this is where Spotify can really leverage this behaviour and add in music as well.

More than an app

Arguably for investors, this evolves Spotify further than just an “app” based business, this builds a portfolio of sites & services that they can really learn from and enables more purchases to fold in and build out on top of. The acquisition and other recent acqusitions enables Ek and co to continue to learn and grow.
Probably most unspoken about; it turns more fanatic (deep and dedicated audiences) data into a rich ad ecosystem. Sports advertising is huge business and will continue to be and here is where brands of all sizes will want to appear.

Video Play?

Spotify now has a multi media play with podcasts, articles, blogs and enables a flirtation with video. Video is a saturated marketplace however video is an important play, especially in sports as it builds affinity to Spotify over other competitors and exclusive video is compelling to 100m plus audience.

Spotify Brand — Branded House or House of Brands

This acquisition increases the potential for Spotify brand, Spotify has an interesting decision to make moving forward, does it become a ‘branded house’ where everything sits under the Spotify brand
Or does Spotify go the ‘house of brands’ route? For me house of brands is a smart play and can build an ecosystem of brands that play up to the global reaching and influential brand that is Spotify.

Media players are fighting with identity in 2020 and continue to do so but by building a house of brands Spotify offers a home for many new networks and enables established brands to build into the parent ecosystem.

Passive Marketing Play

Something that I think this acquisition really plays into is the embed play. It enables Spotify to offer an embed podcast play across the web, this is where Soundcloud lost a lot of traction (by forgetting this is an important element of the web, offer playlists and must listens on other sites).
Passive marketing is always something brands misunderstand or rarely leverage well. Spotify has an opportunity here to enable more embeds and beat competitors with brand presence and great tech.
Just ask Square about their little white boxes and their impact on marketing and then sales.

Spotify has the opportunity to really build a house of brands here, develop out a web and app play and really up its advertising game, smart acquisition, smarter brand play.