Spotify's Spreadbeats campaign by FCB New York built a full music video inside a media plan spreadsheet, winning the Cannes Lions Digital Craft Grand Prix and
ARCHIVESpotify Spreadbeats Rewrites the Rules of B2B Advertising
Spotify's Spreadbeats is a 2024 B2B campaign, created with FCB New York, that delivers a fully functional music video built and distributed entirely within a media plan spreadsheet, targeting brand and agency partners across the United States and beyond.
The campaign follows a single spreadsheet cell — E7 — and its journey of transformation into a colorful 3D character. That evolution serves as a direct metaphor for the creative potential Spotify argues brands can unlock when they treat audio and visual advertising as complementary forces rather than separate disciplines. Rather than embedding a pre-made video file into a document, Spotify and FCB New York coded the music video natively inside the spreadsheet itself, using built-in spreadsheet functions including ASCII, graphs, Unicode, and conditional formatting to generate every frame of animation. The result is a piece of creative media planning that is inseparable from its own distribution format.
The campaign's soundtrack was produced by US DJ John Summit, whose track "Shiver" anchors the emotional arc of the piece. Summit, who began his career in accounting and has described himself as equally comfortable with spreadsheets and DJ mixers, was chosen precisely because his biography bridges the analytical and the artistic — the same tension Spreadbeats sets out to resolve. Rich Frankel, Global Creative Director at Spotify, described the media plan as "the unsung workhorse of our industry" and framed Spreadbeats as an attempt to use the analytical tools of the advertising trade to deliver a memorable, brand-redefining experience for Spotify's commercial partners. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 92 out of 100, reflecting exceptional marks across creative originality, strategic coherence, and measurable commercial impact.
ARCHIVESpotify identified a specific tension at the heart of B2B advertising in the United States: the people most responsible for allocating media budgets spend the majority of their professional lives inside spreadsheets, yet almost no brand has ever attempted to reach them creatively through that format.
The strategic rationale for Spreadbeats rests on a form of radical contextual relevance. Media planners receive Spotify's proposals embedded in spreadsheet documents as a matter of routine. By transforming that routine document into an unexpected creative experience — a digital campaign that lives where the audience already works — Spotify removed every barrier between the message and its recipient. There was no need to click away, no separate platform to visit, no context-switching required. The creative media plan became the medium.
Spotify operates in a streaming market that, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), generated global recorded-music revenue of US$29.6 billion in 2024, with streaming accounting for 69.0% of that total. In the United States, the competitive landscape for digital audio advertising is dominated by a small number of scaled platforms. Spotify held 32.2% of the global music-subscriber market in 2024, according to MIDiA Research, placing it ahead of competitors including Apple Music and Amazon Music in subscriber share. That market leadership strengthens Spotify's position when speaking directly to media planners, but it also raises the bar for how the brand must present itself — particularly as Apple Music and Amazon Music compete aggressively for advertising budgets and brand partnership spend in the US market. Spreadbeats answered that pressure by giving Spotify's sales team a media plan that was itself a demonstration of the platform's creative philosophy, turning a routine commercial touchpoint into a proof of concept for imaginative brand communication.
Spreadbeats represents a category of creative execution that is genuinely rare: a piece of work in which the production method and the strategic idea are identical.
FCB New York's creative team, working under Rich Frankel as Global Creative Director at Spotify, chose to build the music video's animation entirely from spreadsheet-native tools rather than importing any external media. ASCII characters, Unicode symbols, conditional cell formatting, and native graphing functions collectively generate the motion and color of the colorful 3D character that cell E7 becomes across the duration of the piece. This constraint was not a limitation — it was the concept. Every technical decision reinforced the campaign's central argument that creativity can emerge from the most utilitarian of environments.
The choice of John Summit as the soundtrack artist extended that logic into the audio layer. Summit's track "Shiver" provides the emotional architecture that the visual animation follows, and his public background in accounting — before his rise as one of the United States' most prominent electronic music DJs — made him a credible and narratively coherent collaborator rather than a celebrity endorsement. His own quote, noting that his first job was in accounting and that "there can be creativity in every job," functions as both personal testimony and campaign thesis.
As reported by campaignlive.com, the work was recognised at Cannes Lions 2024 with the Digital Craft Grand Prix and a Digital Craft Gold, alongside a Direct Gold — awards that specifically reward the craft of execution rather than concept alone. The One Club for Creativity recognised Spreadbeats at the ADC Annual Awards 2025 with the Best of Show Black Cube, the highest honour in the competition, as well as Best of Discipline Cubes across Advertising, Experiential Design, and Interactive categories, per oneclub.org. Production credits beyond Rich Frankel's creative direction are not comprehensively documented in public sources, though FCB New York is confirmed as the lead agency of record for the campaign, as noted by fcb.com.
Spreadbeats produced verified commercial and industry results that place it among the most effective B2B campaigns in recent US advertising history.
According to One Show case material, Spreadbeats delivered a 17:1 return on investment, generated engagement rates 870% higher than Spotify's previous B2B benchmarks, and produced email forward rates 5,650% above the B2B average — a figure that reflects how thoroughly the work disrupted the expectations of its media-planner audience. As reported by The Drum, Spreadbeats won Gold in the B2B category at The Drum Awards for Digital Experience on November 12, 2024. The Drum further reported, in March 2026, that Spreadbeats had become the world's most awarded campaign in its 2026 World Creative Rankings — a designation that spans the full competitive global field of advertising work from its year of eligibility.
The campaign's awards record is extensive and externally verified. At Cannes Lions 2024, it claimed the Digital Craft Grand Prix, a Digital Craft Gold, and a Direct Gold, as reported by campaignlive.com. At the London International Awards 2024, it received the Creativity in B2B Grand Prix, a Branded Entertainment Gold, and a Creative Use of Data Gold, per oneclub.org. At the ADC Annual Awards 2025, the One Club for Creativity awarded Spreadbeats the Best of Show Black Cube alongside Best of Discipline recognition across Advertising, Experiential Design, and Interactive, per oneclub.org. This body of recognition across distinct judging bodies confirms that Spreadbeats achieved critical consensus — not a single influential jury, but a sustained verdict across the global creative industry that the work represented the highest standard of the digital campaign form in its cycle.
Spreadbeats is a 2024 Spotify B2B campaign by FCB New York that delivers a complete music video built entirely within a media plan spreadsheet. The video follows a single cell, E7, transforming into a colorful 3D character, using only native spreadsheet functions including ASCII, Unicode, and conditional formatting, with a soundtrack by DJ John Summit.
Spotify coded the Spreadbeats music video directly within the spreadsheet using built-in functions. FCB New York used ASCII characters, Unicode symbols, conditional formatting, and native graphs to generate every frame of animation, creating a digital campaign in which the production method and the strategic idea were one and the same.
Spreadbeats won the Digital Craft Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2024, as reported by campaignlive.com, along with a Digital Craft Gold and a Direct Gold. It subsequently received the Best of Show Black Cube at the ADC Annual Awards 2025, per oneclub.org, and was named the world's most awarded campaign in The Drum's 2026 World Creative Rankings.
US DJ John Summit created the Spreadbeats soundtrack using his track "Shiver." Summit was chosen because his professional background began in accounting, making him a narratively coherent collaborator for a campaign built inside a spreadsheet. His own stated belief that creativity exists in every job directly echoed the campaign's central strategic argument.
According to One Show case material, Spreadbeats delivered a 17:1 return on investment. The campaign also produced email forward rates 5,650% above the B2B average and ad engagement rates 870% higher than Spotify's previous B2B benchmarks, establishing it as one of the most measurably effective B2B digital campaigns in recent US advertising history.
Spreadbeats follows Spotify's 2021 FCB New York collaboration "A Song for Every CMO," which generated personalised tracks for major media spenders and drove significant advertising revenue growth, as noted by fcb.com. Spreadbeats extends that philosophy of using Spotify's core creative identity — music and audio — to reach advertising decision-makers through unexpected, format-native experiences.
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