How Spotify’s Wrapped campaign for 2022 came together

It’s this shareability that makes Wrapped such an eye-catching campaign each year. “Wrapped is a very user-centric campaign,” says Rasmus Wangelin, the company’s global head of brand design, over a video call from his home in Brooklyn. “It’s not about Spotify. It’s about the world of audio culture and our users. So the campaign organically becomes bigger the more our users and creators interact with it.”

In his role, Rasmus oversees the creation of the design direction for Wrapped each year. One of the most gratifying parts of the process for him is witnessing the campaign take on a life of its own, whether that’s other brands creating their own fake Wrapped share cards or the meme that goes out each October without fail, stating, “It’s now time to start listening to cool music”, in an effort to influence the data by the end of the year. Because, as Rasmus points out, “There’s no hiding behind Wrapped. You’re gonna have to own it.”

They are all designed within a 16-by-16 grid to make them feel cohesive, even though they each incorporate distinct layer combinations. “The idea here is that each one of these monograms combines layers with different characteristics,” Bruno explains. “And you can see that every one of these monograms has square shapes, spiky shapes, round and soft.” These different shapes are a visual reference to the diversity and variety in people’s listening habits. Once these layered monograms were designed, Bruno and his team introduced a “generous colour palette”, producing 48 different combinations of shapes and colours. Behind this was a desire “to make original articulations within that, so that none of the two would feel the same, but they will feel like they come from the same place.”

The other aspect of this year’s design direction that leaps off the screen is the motion design. Bruno worked with Hornet, a New York-based production studio, on introducing motion into the designs, to ensure they didn’t feel static and lifeless. He wanted each layer within each monogram to feel as if they have their own “personality” and “behaviour”. As Rasmus adds, “We wanted to bring to the forefront that we’re all unique. The monograms are going to do that to a certain extent, but motion is really going to bring that home. All the shapes have their own motion language as well.”

One of the major questions for Rasmus, when working with Bruno and the design team, was: “How do we bring that playful interactivity to our users, so that it gets shared more than ever and people have fun with it as well?” Perhaps the place where this focus is most visible is on the out-of-home billboards and digital screens. Here, Wrapped becomes highly interactive and playful, packed with in-jokes and tongue-in-cheek references. One poster offers New York commuters a word-search game around guessing popular genres, while another asks where listeners heard Beyoncé’s Break My Soul in 2022: “In 233m+ streams? While releasing the wiggle? Obviously both.” As Rasmus suggests, this is a relatively new use of OOH: “You’re not used to seeing advertising and billboards this way. So we’re really trying to push it and lead with that play and interactivity.”