Issue #2: The Year in Review, Reviewed
The rise of the ubiquitous year in review (and why we all eat it up).
Welcome back to Brand Baby, and a very warm welcome to everyone who’s new here – I’m so happy you found BB. In our second issue (go read the first here if you haven’t yet!), we’re talking annual recaps and year-in-review content from brands. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like nearly every social media platform or community software product did some sort of annual wrap-up for their users this year. We’re all familiar with Spotify Wrapped by now, but as one of the strongest examples of an annual recap out there, I still think it’s worth analyzing. We’ll also explore other year-in-review brand content and how it stacks up. Let’s dive in.
Spotify has released a version of Spotify Wrapped every year since 2015, but in recent years, the music platform’s annual release of your personal listening habits has blown up. And Spotify keeps making it better. This year, they gifted us with a ‘Sound Town,’ or a location based on our listening preferences (shout out to any other Burlingtons out there, xoxo). Spotify Wrapped excels because it curates highly personalized content based on each listener’s data, while also connecting listeners across shared listening patterns and the intrinsic desire to know what your roommate/cousin/ex-boyfriend/manager listens to, since music is such a personal, intimate representation of self. I would argue that this is what makes Wrapped the most successful of any annual brand recap out there: it has both personalization and shareability going for it. Some of this success can be attributed to the nature of the content; music is something that is so fun, so social, so human, which just isn’t quite the same as, say, if Beli shared a recap of your restaurant data (although, not a bad idea for Beli). And for such a wide-reaching campaign, Spotify Wrapped relies primarily on internal engineering lift, making it fairly inexpensive to pull off.
While not nearly as successful as Spotify Wrapped, Reddit also publishes Reddit Recaps every year, showcasing individualized stats like how much time users have spent on the platform, content they’ve engaged with, and communities they’ve joined. Just like Spotify, Reddit creates shareable content to encourage users to post their recaps to their social channels. But unlike Spotify, personalized Reddit content isn’t exactly the type of stuff I would imagine most people are dying to share with their entire social network. Isn’t anonymity one of the main points of Reddit? Most users might not feel inclined to share that they’re the top user in r/cats (or worse). And let’s be real, being a top Reddit user is not a point of pride.
TikTok published a Year on TikTok last week, where they list out the platform’s top videos, music tracks, creators, small businesses, and more across all users. It’s interesting to see what TikTok pulled for this recap. Since the rate of social media virality travels faster than the speed of light, and the pure volume of content is overwhelming, what might be considered one of the top videos of the year could be entirely unknown to the majority of TikTok users. It’s probably challenging for most users to find anything to connect with in the majority of this content because it’s buried under mountains of other high-performing content on TikTok. And particularly when you’re siloed into your little TikTok corner, you’re just not getting exposed to other types of content. TikTok could have a lot more success with a recap if they made the content specific to each user.
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A bit of an aside, but it’s also worth mentioning that YouTube used to post a YouTube Rewind video at the end of every year, but then everyone got mad because they weren’t showcasing diverse, sometimes contentious creators in the rewind videos, and instead opting to feature safer, blander, and more advertiser-friendly creators. RIP to YouTube Rewind. For something that Google is doing right, check out their Year in Search. They just came out with 25 Years in Search a few days ago, which, I’m not going to lie, might have made me cry a little. Just a little!!
Taking a brief departure from recap content, Pinterest publishes Pinterest Predicts at the end of each year, in which they forecast the upcoming year’s trends. This year, their round-up included things like ‘Aquatecture’ (apparently we’re all about to become ‘undersea gardeners’??) and ‘Be Jelly’ (I think I could get behind a jellyfish aesthetic, actually). Taking it a step further, how great would it be if Pinterest reflected on their 2024 predictions in a year’s time with ‘Pinterest Reflects’? They should pull data from their platform at the end of the year to analyze the success of each anticipated trend… like how much did searches for ‘jellyfish bag’ increase in 2024?
So, what does the year in review successfully accomplish? First of all, recap content relies on packaging up user data and distributing it to individual users or to an entire audience base in a simplified yet engaging format. In order to do this, brands need to have a pile of customer data to pull from and build patterns around. The narrative around customer data capture has historically been pretty negative, and often still continues to be. But by crafting a personalized story for each user around their data, brands are reshaping that narrative. They’re owning up to the fact that they do collect a variety of information about you, but they’re also turning that data into this fun and exciting and interesting thing. While you still may not know all of the ways in which they’re using your information, you do know that they made a cool recap with it, and for some (myself included), that’s just fine.
Why do we enjoy these recaps so much? You might have your own reasons, but I think that year in review content actually contributes to one’s sense of self. With personalized recaps like Spotify Wrapped and Reddit Recaps, we feel a sense of identity and self-assurance when we’re being told something about ourselves. It’s kind of like taking a personality test, getting labeled as an ENTJ, and feeling aligned with those characteristics. It’s so true that I’m a Burlington, and I just didn’t know it was true until Spotify told me.
They also do such a great job of making me feel special. If I’m in the top 1% of Taylor Swift listeners (truth be told, I was only in the top 4% this year), then that makes me feel unique. That stat demonstrates that few people are as big fans of Taylor Swift as I am, and in a world where sentiments towards Taylor are akin to godliness, that means something. Of course I’m going to want to share that with everyone I know. It feels good to be told who we are and how we’re different from everyone else. Personalized recaps – and particularly those that share engaging, intimate, and communal information such as music – tell us and others who we are. I, for one, would not be opposed to seeing more annual recaps in other spaces. Wellness, entertainment, travel, and dating all seem like natural spaces for this type of content. I want to see how many times I meditated on Headspace this year or how many yoga classes I took, and which instructor taught me the most. Netflix should tell me which shows I watched and Goodreads should show me all the books I read and the respective ratings I provided. In fact, tons of people are already doing their own annual dating recaps. Looks like Hinge has their work cut out for them.
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If you liked this issue, please consider forwarding it to a friend or sharing the link with your communities – it means so much to me as we’re in the newborn stage of Brand Baby! Have a great rest of your week.
Loved this!! I hadn't heard about Reddit Recaps.
Love this one.