Ad gamification continues, this time with a new ad for Netflix’s Happy Gilmore 2 on Spotify.
Users of the audio app who encounter the ad can play rounds of golf to reveal Easter eggs from the Happy Gilmore universe, hear clips from the film, and access a personalized “happy” playlist.
The ad is the first time it has created a custom audio gaming experience for an advertiser. That said, it’s not a new ad unit or offering—Spotify has been creating custom experiences for advertisers since 2021. Spotify has previously created experiences for a collaboration between Coca-Cola and Oreo as well as for Amex.
The ad unit is dubbed “the stage,” Kay Hsu, global head of the creative lab at Spotify, said. “It’s an in-app branded experience. It’s usually really interactive. It’s custom-made for each brand, so each experience is very different.”
To create the game, Spotify worked with Netflix on a brief inspired by the character of Happy, and “leaned on a lot of nostalgia, obviously, to develop the design treatment,” Hsu said.
While there has been more interest in gamified ads from marketers like Disney, Amazon, and Discord, as Marketing Brew previously reported, that trend wasn’t the starting point for Spotify. That Happy Gilmore 2 is about a game made it a natural fit to gamify the ad, Hsu said. The experience was created by Spotify’s in-house team and produced by MiK Studio.
Should advertisers want their own game, that’s something Spotify is game for—Hsu said the platform is up for still more when it comes to immersive ads. “People think of Spotify as just an audio platform, but it isn’t,” she said. “It’s really immersive.”
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