I find many Spotify ads annoying for many of the same reasons as other contributors to this thread. Rather than restate their objections again, I'm going to lay out the business case against Spotify's current advertising practices. I do this in the hopes that financial reasoning will change Spotify where consumer complaints have not been consistently effective. [My qualifications: I have years of experience in online advertising, conversion rates and end user preference measurement with some of the biggest sites on the internet.]
Spotify's current advertising practices are lowering the value of its product to customers and advertisers alike.
- Spotify's value to its financial stakeholders and advertisers lies in the size of its audience, yet Spotify is driving away many users who find these ads offensive as well as users for whom they are unacceptable in work/family settings.
- The advertisers behind these ads, such as Trojan, aren't benefiting from Spotify's placement of ads to people who are offended by them and who are highly unlikely to buy the product.
- Advertisers with ads that are not offensive to such audience segments will think twice about advertising on Spotify if they know that their ads may be presented together with profane, suggestive or explicit content.
I'm sure that Spotify and its advertisers would love to have a sophisticated ad targeting system that would deliver personalized, high-conversion-rate ads. I'd be surprised if such as system is not on Spotify's backlog, but such systems take time and resources to develop. In the meantime, a simple binary flag could be quickly implemented that would increase the value of Spotify to customers, advertisers and financial backers alike. The simplest case would be to add a binary "Mature-content" flag to user profiles and advertisements and to only serve Mature ads to people who have indicated that such ads are acceptable.
It's entirely possible that Spotify decision makers feel that they might lose advertising revenue if they do anything like this that diminishes the reported size of its audience. I think the probability is greater that if Spotify does nothing, its audience will grow more slowly if at all, and advertisers will abandon Spotify due to low conversion rates.
By the way, in reviewing threads on this site related to this topic, I see some posts by Spotify Community reps that purport to give solutions to particular complaints. The solution, to remove ads that generate a particularly large number of complaints from the ad rotation, is a poor one. It doesn't prevent similar situations from reoccurring and it's not a good way to do business with advertisers. Spotify needs a technical solution that matches ads to customers. A simple binary flag would be a good start.
