Spotify turned the media-plan spreadsheet into the ad

Spotify's ad audience is B2B: the media planners and buyers who place brands' budgets across channels. These are the people whose daily work lives almost entirely inside the media-plan spreadsheets agencies and platforms exchange — tables of placements, budgets and reach. Yet to convince them Spotify was more than a digital-audio player, Spotify advertised through ordinary paid media: films placed where a busy planner scrolling for their next deliverable could easily miss them, competing for seconds of attention against every other pitch in the same feed.

The conventional campaign takes a hard-won creative idea and buys its way in front of the decision-maker through third-party real estate. The planner's genuine workspace — the spreadsheet they are paid to live in — was treated as a preview of the pitch the way a deck is, never as the medium itself.

Spotify and FCB New York built a four-minute music video coded entirely inside the same Excel media-plan spreadsheets Spotify already sends to advertising clients, using only the native tools planners use every day — ASCII, Unicode, charts, conditional formatting — so rows and columns come alive as an animated character and soundtrack. It told the story of a single cell, E7, born into a world of numbers, who journeys toward realizing audio and visual media can combine.

Built the ad inside the media-plan spreadsheet itself, using native Excel tools to animate a story, so the required artifact proves video capability in video form.

The spreadsheet is the one file planners cannot ignore, so the ad reaches them at the moment of work.

Delivering the message inside the required document costs zero media spend and cannot be swiped past.

Demonstrating video capability by building video in Excel proves the claim more credibly than any bought assertion.

Using only native spreadsheet tools signals engineering depth, making the message believable through demonstration.

Find the routine document your buyer must open daily and remake it, using only its native tools, into the pitch itself.

Cannes Titanium shortlist and a 14-market rollout; won the 2025 D&AD Black Pencil. Reported ROI lifts are case-study figures. The mechanism — making the routine operational document a supplier already hands the counterparty into the deliverable — earned FCB New York Agency of the Year and D&AD's Network of the Year in 2025, and was cited by the award jury as an example of a brand 'working its way into an existing platform' rather than renting one.