Seek and Spotify team up to help lull anxious workers back to sleep
Employment platform Seek has partnered with streaming service Spotify on a project which aims to calm the anxieties of Australia’s workforce as it grapples with COVID-19, an economic recession and “unprecedented” circumstances.
Seek’s marketing director Jennifer ten Seldam told Mumbrella the brand noticed a spike in people searching for career advice and insights between 10pm and 3am – confirming that people are losing sleep due to the crisis.
Seek’s Sleepmix will be available until September
“It’s obviously really playing on people’s minds in the middle of the night, and I think we could all really relate to that,” she said.
The brand realised a large number of people had problems which needed solving, but this in itself was creating a further problem – a lack of sleep.
Ten Seldam said Spotify was a natural partner for the project, because both brands use customer experience and customer behavioural data to drive their outcomes and offering.
The result is a curated list of tracks to accompany Seek’s career advice articles, which “appeal to the person listening, but also really work to relax them and send them off to sleep”.
Australian artist Briggs also delivers bespoke ‘Bedtime Rhymes’, which reflect the current mindset of many anxious Australians. Bill Thompson, director of the Music, Sound and Performance Lab at Macquarie University consulted across Sleepmix’s audio content elements to ensure it is relaxing and will resonate with consumers.
The campaign’s success doesn’t hinge on traffic spikes, ten Seldam said, but will instead be measured on its problem-solving capabilities.
“What we want to be able to see is people saying ‘Gosh I was having this problem. I was one of the 44% of people that is staying up late at night, and I engaged with this piece of content, and I found it genuinely helpful and it helped give me perspective on my problem. Maybe it didn’t solve it for me completely, but at least it helped me get a decent night’s sleep and feel better about being able to deal with it in the morning’. If we could see that – a perception shift in the candidate side – then we will feel like we’ve done our job.”
Being helpful to the site’s future customers – rather than putting out a generic COVID brand ad – is important, she added.
“It’s not the time for [generic COVID advertising] right now. People want really tangible value,” she said. “It almost seems wasteful in some respects to put money into marketing talking about yourself when you what you should be doing is trying to help.”
Kai Battaglene, account director at Spotify, noted the platform is already used by consumers in a bid to get more shut-eye.
“We see audiences stream on Spotify specifically to help them with their sleep or to relax. In fact, when we look at the top moments searched in Australia, we see ‘chill’ and ‘sleep’ as the top two search terms respectively. The Seek Sleepmix delivers a personalised listening experience, customised to an individual’s music taste and need. With Spotify’s access to unique audience insights, drive results and campaign measurement, we knew the Seek Sleepmix campaign was a fantastic opportunity for us to partner with a brand and demonstrate what is possible with a partnership on the platform,” Battaglene said.
TBWA Melbourne worked on the campaign.
“Australians are up late worrying about their careers so we wanted to find a way to empathise with how they are feeling as well as bringing them a fresh perspective. Hip hop and rap artists do this so authentically, although they don’t usually do it to help ease stress and anxiety. Briggs’ talents and unique voice made him the perfect choice to write soothing Bedtime Rhymes and voice the career advice for the Sleepmix experience,” the agency said.
Just what the potentially un-employed need, a $15 per month Spotify direct debit.
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A master class in brand killing. No respect for what the brand was, its equities, its meaning, its tone etc. It’s really bad.
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I love the seek brand ‘seek and you shall find’. This stuff is turgid. It uses none of the equity built over time. It’s got nothing to do with ‘hope’ seeks proposition and the tone is completely wrong.
This is just bad.
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How many of us aren’t losing sleep at the moment due to work stress (or, worse, unemployment stress)? A nice, human and engaging way for Seek to link what they do with what we are all feeling without pandering to covidtising cliches. Big applause for effortless use of Indigeneous talent. And @Me – “seek and you shall find” was soooo 15 years ago or more – but more importantly, try telling that to the mass unemployed competing against 500 candidates for every available job. Seek and you shall sleep!
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Ah, Mumbrella commenters, always there to pull down a campaign idea.
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Work for TBWA Melbourne much? I dislike…
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Dreamy..
Think you’re confused with Spotify Premium?
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I think this is a really lovely campaign idea. Smart platform pairing and supports their customers when they need it. Love it!
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You know there is a free tier of Spotify that has advertising to cover the cost?
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