Gatorade Amplify
Create a playlist tailored to your workout
Gatorade partnered with Spotify in 2016 with a vision to create a data-driven, personalized web experience that would anchor Gatorade’s North American marketing campaign. In turn, Spotify engaged Hydric to design and deliver this experience.
Gatorade worked with university researchers to identify acoustic attributes scientifically proven to enhance workout performance. Hydric was engaged to take these acoustic attributes and synthesize them into a web application that generated personalized, performance-enhancing playlists for users.
In order to bring the innovative features of the app to life, Hydric needed to find the right APIs to leverage. Hydric identified and mapped the integration of both public and beta Spotify APIs to power playlist personalization. Hydric’s wealth of knowledge and previous experience integrating Spotify’s API into experiences like Playlist Playground and Visual Taste sped this process and ensured quality playlist responses.
In a world-first, Spotify’s playlist recommendation engine was paired with Spotify track crossfading technology that generated playlists which transition accurately between timed interval training segments. In another first, Hydric’s proprietary playlist management platform, Lineup, was integrated to refresh user playlists each week, just like Spotify’s popular Discover Weekly feature.
Brand integrity was a high priority for Gatorade on this project and led to close collaboration between Hydric management, Spotify ad solutions, Gatorade’s marketing team, and Gatorade’s roster of agencies including VML and Omnicom.
The application launched November 2016 and the campaign ran until March 2017. The national-scale digital campaign and the web application itself greatly exceeded expectations, yielding hundreds of thousands of user sessions, and tens of thousands of playlists generated. It was highlighted in leading publications including Fast Company, CNET, and B&T.
In June 2017, the Gatorade Amplify project won a Silver Clio Award for Apps and a Bronze Clio Award for Innovation.
"Heading into this project we found we need to understand the listener extremely well but we also need to understand the content, the music itself, at a very, very deep level. And the only way that we can do that is being able to tap into and harness extensive information and data."
— Tim Ganss - Head of Echo Nest Commercial Platform, Spotify