Connecting in context with GAIA Design

A home office used to be a luxury. But, as a result of world events in the last year, it’s become a necessity for many of us. Living rooms were converted to classrooms, beds doubled as work desks, and—for the very lucky—walk-in broom closets became makeshift virtual call rooms. But adapting your home doesn’t necessarily mean having to improvise.

GAIA Design, the leading urban home furniture design and houseware company in Mexico, is dedicated to helping people personalize their homes and offices. They knew people were struggling to adjust to the sudden changes brought on by the pandemic. So they worked with Spotify to get the word out about how easy it can be to design a more comfortable work-from-home space. We sat down with the brand to learn why they chose Spotify, and what they learned from their campaign.

Spotify: Why was audio the right medium to deliver this message?

GAIA: Our audience consumes this medium organically—music is personal and so is home design. They go hand-in-hand.

Spotify: Why was Spotify Ad Studio the right channel to bring this campaign to life?

GAIA: We used Spotify’s voiceover audio profile tool to create our audio spot. We found a perfect fit for the voice we wanted to communicate our message. And we found the free audio ad creation tool to be very flexible. Being able to upload a script, choose a voice actor, and have an audio ad produced in less than 48 hours was excellent.

The control, speed and flexibility of the channel made sense for us. But the real magic was in the channel’s ability to give us empathy and insight into what context our target audience was experiencing while listening to our ad.

Spotify: You used real-time contexts to target users studying and focusing on their work. Why was this targeting option the right fit for your campaign?

GAIA: We wanted to let people know that working from your bed is not okay — you can design a better space for yourself! But we needed this message to be delivered to listeners at exactly the right time. So we decided to target people when our message would be most relevant to them: when they were concentrating on their work or studying at home.

Spotify Ad Studio’s real-time context targeting helped us put ourselves in our consumer's shoes. We share Spotify playlists amongst ourselves — we know our moods and the music we listen to totally differs between activities: music for washing the dishes isn’t the same as music for reading or even for playing sports. By taking this into consideration, we were able to really think about the moods we wanted to tap into with our message. As a result, we shared an inclusive, empathetic, and humorous message with our audience in moments that would resonate with them.

Spotify: Why did you choose Spotify to reach your target audience of students and people working from home?

GAIA: We always seek to innovate in the media formats we use and spearhead new ideas. We wanted to immediately tackle audio ads as a medium. And we are all Spotify users—we know the brand. We knew we could empathize with the other Spotify listeners in our audience.

Spotify: What results did you see from this campaign?

GAIA: We were surprised by the .66% click-through rate we received as a result of the campaign. It far exceeded our expectations in terms of click-through rate for an audio ad with a companion banner (the global Ad Studio benchmark is .1%).

Being able to see what percentage of our audience listened to the ad in full on our Ad Studio dashboard was great. We knew that impressions were not wasted. And because of this, we’re confident the efforts of this campaign will have a long-lasting impact on our business.

Spotify Ad Studio gave us the tools we needed to harness the power of audio.