When You Hit Pause, You’re Still Playing

Introduction

Welcome to another exciting week!

Table of Contents

• Best Ad of the Week

• Latest Trends and News

• Weekly Tip

• Weekly Challenge

Sponsored Section

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Best Ad of the Week

Spotify – “Pause Is Part of the Song” (2025 Global Campaign)

Spotify’s “Pause Is Part of the Song” reframes a tiny universal behaviour—the moment we hit pause—as something meaningful. The film shows different people freezing music at decisive moments: a cyclist stopping to help someone, a chef turning off their playlist to taste a dish, a student pausing before sending a message, a woman silencing music to watch her child sleep. Each vignette ends with the track resuming exactly where life left off. The closing line reads: “Life doesn’t interrupt music. It completes it.”

Key marketing lessons

• Celebrate behaviour, not consumption: Spotify highlights the moments between listening, revealing emotional depth in something mundane.
• Human rhythm as brand rhythm: The idea positions Spotify not as background noise, but as a companion that adapts to life’s tempo.
• Minimalism improves emotional punch: Soft visuals and a single piano track make the storytelling feel intimate and sincere.
• Universality at scale: Everyone pauses music, making the concept globally relatable without localisation.
• Story-first product proof: The seamless track continuation quietly demonstrates the product experience without explanation or features.

If you want the next ad lesson centred on a European brand, a challenger brand or something more experimental, just tell me.

Latest Trends and News

• Unilever Moves to “Social-First” Marketing
  Unilever has committed to allocating 50% of its media budget to social and influencer channels, shifting away from traditional mass media. It aims to establish an influencer in every local market and re-engineer its global marketing structure accordingly.

• Netcore Cloud Launches “Agentic Marketing 2025” Summit
  Netcore Cloud is spearheading a major industry summit in partnership with Google Cloud to explore the next evolution of marketing—moving from automation to fully autonomous, agentic systems that can execute campaigns independently.

• Branding Day 2025 Gathers Marketing Leaders in Bilbao
  Branding Day 2025, held at the Guggenheim Bilbao, brought together marketing and advertising professionals to discuss technology-driven shifts in consumer passion, branding sound, AI ethics and e-commerce strategies.

Sponsored Section

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Weekly Tip

Avoid Over-Explaining

Your audience doesn’t need every detail to understand the point. Give just enough context to make the message clear.

• Share the essential idea, not the full backstory
• Trust readers to fill in obvious gaps
• Let simplicity carry the insight

When you stop over-explaining, your message becomes tighter, clearer, and far more engaging.

Weekly Challenge

Audience Warm-Up Story

This week, re-engage your followers before posting:

• Before sharing a main post, publish one short Story that warms up your audience with a question, poll, or quick thought related to your niche
• Do this three times during the week, each time a few hours before a feed post
• Track whether your posts gain more comments and reach when preceded by a warm-up Story

Pre-engaging your audience primes them to interact with your content.

Submissions + Feedback

Hope you enjoyed today’s post, if you know someone who may be interested, feel free to send it to them.

Also, if you want me to cover any specific subject on the next issue or share some feedback, feel free to reply to this email.