One More Question

Rasmus Wängelin: Spotify – Global campaigns with local nuance (+ the story of Spotify Wrapped)

Episode Summary

Rasmus Wängelin, Spotify's Global Head of Brand Design, joins Ross in Episode #52. In his role at Spotify, Rasmus leads a team of designers, art directors, and design directors to spearhead Spotify’s brand and marketing design initiatives globally. Since joining in 2016, the Spotify in-house team has been recognized as “In-house agency of the year” 4 times — 18’(Ad-Age) & 19’ 20’ 21’(ADC). His work has been globally recognized and awarded by Cannes Lions, One Show, Art Directors Club, D&AD, and more. Ross and Rasmus discuss the continued success of Wrapped, how Spotify delivers nuanced campaigns at scale, and how they've avoided falling into the product-first trap to balance both brand and product needs.

Episode Notes

Highlights from the conversation

• I think Wrapped is a magical project because it's one of the only marketing projects where you have millions of people sharing their own experience of the year through the share card
• Start with guiding principles – What does your brand stand for? What are you trying to do? How does that come to life?
• That's part of the magic of Wrapped – you release it to the world and then it just kind of takes its own life.
• We have this lens where we don't really talk about Spotify. We don't say ‘we're great, we have millions of songs’. We tell stories, and majority of the stories we tell are through the lens of what's happening
• The brand is always, in one way or another, echoing the sentiment of the company and its founders
• Simple, graphic, colorful became three fundamentally important words that we could apply to all of the design work we were doing

More about Rasmus Wängelin 

Originally from Sweden, Rasmus is a New York based designer & director currently working as Global Head of Brand Design at Spotify. In his role at Spotify, Rasmus leads a team of designers, art directors and design directors to spearhead Spotify’s brand and marketing design-initiatives globally. Since joining in 2016, the Spotify in-house team has been recognized as “In-house agency of the year” 4 times — 18’(Ad-Age) & 19’ 20’ 21’(ADC).

Prior to Spotify Rasmus spent 8 years at R/GA leading design-teams across clients like Nike, Samsung and Google.

His work has been globally recognized and awarded by Cannes Lions, One Show, Art Directors Club, D&AD and more. Rasmus has taught classes at Hyper-Island, School of Visual Arts, Columbia University and was a design jury for 2018 The One Show.

Find Rasmus here:

Website | LinkedIn | Instagram

Show Notes

People:

• Alex Bodman
• Alex Tanguay
• Ben Crick
• Ben Crick on One More Question
• Brian Collins

Companies and organisations:

• COLLINS

Miscellaneous:

• Spotify Wrapped

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One More Question is a podcast by Nicework, a purpose-driven company helping people who want to make a dent in the world by building brands people give a shit about.

One of the things we do best is ask our clients the right questions. This podcast came about because we want to share some of the best answers we have heard over the last 13 years. We talk to significant creators, experts and communicators we encounter and share useful insights, inspiration, and facts that make us stop and take note as we go about our work.

Hosted by our founder Ross Drakes.

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