trends

The Spotify-Wrapped Library Marketing Hack

If your library is hot on protecting user-data and privacy, there’s a great opportunity coming up to tie in some marketing with Spotify Wrapped. I’m sure you’re familiar - Spotify extensively mines your usage date over the last year and gives you a nicely packaged graphic summary of it - which many, many people tend to share their version of on social media.

In marketing terms, it's often easier (and more productive) to join in an existing conversation than to start a new one, so the idea is simply to produce a Library Wrapped which cannot give any useful info on what patrons read and did, because WE take user data and privacy seriously. We get the social currency of the Spotify wrapped discourse, and also get to make a useful (and, I think, not widely known) point about libraries being a real outlier these days in actually protecting, rather than exploiting and shilling, user data.

I made a mock-up of the sort of thing I mean, based on the visual style of a previous Spotify year. (And it goes without saying, this is an example with fictional categories to illustrate the idea - obviously you need to be on rock-solid ground with any claims you make about user-privacy at your actual library, so only say things you know are true!)

A mock-up of what a Library Wrapped might look like

I searched for library wrapped examples to see if anyone was already doing this - quite a lot are doing it with total visitor stats etc rather than the privacy angle, like this example from Pembroke, and I think that works too.

I did find one library who has already done my suggestion above, and frankly much better than my mockup! Albany Public Library posted this back in 2021:

Bright graphics with a shrug icon. Text says: We don't keep track of what you read, watch, or listen to because privacy should be the default not the exception

Anyway: providing, as mentioned above, you’re completely confident in your claims, make the most of this opportunity to get some advocacy and marketing out into the world!