Trendsettrs: Wes Young
Spotify Comms Planning leader answers what comms planning actually is, why brands need it, and what frameworks he uses.
Hi friends! Today’s newsletter is free thanks to Above the Fold, a Comms Strategy community with 60+ members founded by Drew Forrest (head of Comms at Nice&Frank). There’s a mix of agency-side and brand-side folks from companies like W+K, Droga, Spotify, Expedia, Lego, TBWA, Martin Agency, WeatherTech, including yours truly. 😘 Hit up Drew at drewjforrest@gmail.com if interested!
Trendsettrs: Wes Young
Trendsettrs is a Pollinatr column about marketers blazing their own trails. They’ll share tactical advice from the front lines that will help you be smarter at your job.
Meet Wes!
Wes Young is based in Los Angeles and leads Global Comms Planning at Spotify. Before joining the music & audio streaming company, he held global comms planning roles at media & creative agencies, including Initiative, GroupM and a nearly 10-year run at Wieden+Kennedy in both New York City and Amsterdam.
His brand experience spans everything from consumer packaged goods like Milka, beverages like Welch’s and Corona, tech brands like Instagram and Uber, luxury goods like Montblanc, and of course, music & entertainment including Spotify and Amazon Prime Video.
Wes and I met each other when we were fresh out of college working at Wieden + Kennedy NYC together as media planners on the Booking.com account. Booking.yeah! (had to lol). We had the best time working in the trenches together living in the glory days of media being poor but getting taken out to fancy dinners and living that suite life at concerts.
Wes has had an awesome journey in the world of comms and media planning, and is helping establish the function at Spotify. This is a FEAT if you’ve ever tried to establish a new function before, especially one that changes the creative process.
Our convo below covers:
🗺️ His fav Comms Planning frameworks
✨ Advice for establishing a Comms Planning discipline and skills any Comms Planner needs
🎧 A Comms Planning break down of the Webby award-winning “My Spotify” campaign
Michelle: Career highlight/something you're most proud of?
Wes: What immediately springs to mind is Instagram’s “Stories Are Everywhere” campaign to launch Stories. It’s almost a decade old now, but it had a very clear comms strategy “Story-ify the World” which allowed creative and media to collaborate and have fun with every placement.
Whether wall murals or bus shelters or a cinema takeover where we turned just about every surface into a Story, or the shot-on-mobile, made-for-social videos, we were really able to bring the feature to life.
Ultimately, it worked, and shifted teen’s perception of Instagram from a place for life’s highlights to a place for everyday moments. In retrospect, it’s also a campaign that marked a change in how I view success, shifting from output and deliverables to impact and strategic contributions, and that’s been critical for my career.
Michelle: What actually IS Comms Planning for those who don't know???
Wes: Ask 10 Comms Strategists/Comms Planners and you’ll get 10 different answers that are different ways of saying the same thing!
I like to say Comms Planning helps ideas break through: with our audience, in culture, in and out of marketing. If marketing is the transfer of enthusiasm, from brand to consumer, Comms Planning helps identify and scale the ideas that are most likely to excite, and it makes sure that those ideas land in places and spaces where they will be noticed and understood.
Comms Planning uses the understanding of consumer and message context to make sure people feel something, not just know something, about our brands.
I can’t understate the importance of “breaking through in and out of marketing.” Comms Planning is a collaborative role and part of our job is helping everyone internally, marketing or not, understand and see the potential of ideas in the early stages of development to get buy-in and resources.
Michelle: What are the three most important skills a comms planner can have?
Wes:
Soft influence: we are not the final arbiters of what work gets made or responsible for executing ideas, but Comms Planners need to be able to shape and guide to align creative and marketing plans with the comms strategy. You catch more flies with honey, as the saying goes. Pollinatr pun 100% intended.
Thrive in ambiguity (and sometimes chaos): Every team and every project is a little bit different and Comms Planners need to be able to adjust how they contribute to projects. Anyone who has ever made a campaign knows that there is a new curveball every day. The best thing a Comms Planner can do is keep a cool head and be an invaluable partner in navigating that ambiguity and chaos toward the best possible outcome. Some people call this being solutions-oriented, which is one part of it, but you also need to be ready to listen or to offer support in achieving a solution you’ve been handed.
Third, you need to balance storytelling and systems thinking. Comms Planners sit in between Creatives - who tend to be storytellers - and Channels (eg Media, Social) - who tend to be systems thinkers. It’s your job to help the storytellers bring those stories to life in systems, and it’s also your job to help the systems thinkers understand why the story, or at least key parts of it, are important.
Let’s say creative brings you an amazing story, but 90% of the time you cannot fit that whole story into a singular marketing channel, and a crucial part of our job is work with the creative to determine what must be true for the story to be told, and what is color, things that make the story more vibrant but can be altered so it fits into the marketing channels we are using.
Each channel or placement will tell a part of the story, so you also need to make sure those teams understand what part of the story they are telling so their plans highlight what must be true while layering in as much color as they can.
Michelle: Can you share an example of a project you worked on that was exponentially improved with comms planning?
Wes: Earlier this year, the “My Spotify” campaign won a Webby for Brand Strategy. On its face it seems like such a straightforward campaign: highlight some of our ~678M users’ unique Spotify worlds. But we also wanted to make sure specific features were included, and not every feature has the same level of awareness or usage that Spotify overall has. So our comms challenge was “how can we be inspirational overall but educational when it matters?”



That meant breaking down the messages across the marketing funnel. Awareness media like OOH and Online Video were generally focused on brand messaging, while more action-oriented media like Paid Social and our On Platform messaging drove people to specific features.
But, even within channels we had to do some breakdowns. For example, when we were on large format, above-street-level boards, we only ran brand messaging, but when we were on street level units, we called out specific features with a short explanation & how to find it, like “search daylist for your day in a playlist.”
In the end we were able to improve overall brand metrics and drive feature awareness and usage, in part because comms planning helped make the messaging really sharp within each channel.
Michelle: What are some of your favorite frameworks? Please share a few with us!
Wes: There are two I tend to use over and over: Say, Be, Do and Awareness & Activation.
Say, Be, Do is typically for larger campaigns with a lot of elements. Think annual brand campaign, or a major brand moment like Nike during the World Cup.
Say: Answers what we’re saying in the campaign, the main message we want out in the world. This is normally tied to broad awareness channels like Video and OOH.
Be: A mindset or feeling we want to give the audience or be associated with. Maybe we want the audience to feel empowered, or connected, or seen. How can we as a brand create that feeling? How do we embody it? This might not represent a lot of your spend, but it’s where I always want to see the best representation of the strategy & creative idea brought to life.
Do: What action do we want the audience to take? Where are we putting our clearest CTA, what is that CTA, and where does it lead?
Awareness & Activation is simpler, and in my experience I use it a lot for new product launches, repeat campaigns where we’re refreshing creative, or campaigns with a quick turn where I know we won’t be able to get super bespoke with creative & channel executions.
Awareness: What’s the main message & which channels are we using to drive awareness of the brand, product & message?
Activation: What action do we need the audience to take and how are we going to get them to do it?
Michelle: Tell us what you do at Spotify! And what advice do you have for establishing new functions (it's definitely not for the faint of heart!)?
Wes: Well as you hinted at, in addition to doing the comms planning on Spotify’s global marketing campaigns (including Wrapped!) I’ve been building out the comms planning function.
Someone once described me as a “process-oriented strategist” and that has really come in handy, because so much of establishing a function is figuring out what processes are already in place, where Comms Planning fits in, or where the process needs to evolve to allow Comms Planning to be most effective.
My advice is to listen first. Make people feel heard and understood and determine where the function is going to add the most value, which is not always in line with what your expectations might have been.
After you’ve listened you can set the vision, and this is where you need buy-in from your peers and other stakeholders so that you can actually implement that vision. Not everyone is going to understand what you do at first, but that’s OK as long as they feel they’re getting value from you as a partner. A colleague recently told me that at first he couldn’t point to exactly what I was doing, but he knew he wanted me on his projects because he had seen me bring value on other projects.
And then you need to be prepared to listen again and again and again, take a critical look at what’s working and what isn’t, and make adjustments.
Michelle: What's a cultural trend you're paying attention to and why?
Wes: At Spotify we aim to be fan-first, as seen in our most recent brand campaign, so I’m always on the lookout for trends that have an overlap with passionate fandoms.

Right now we’re seeing the rise of ‘fandom fits’ or fandom-inspired outfits. While some of these might be more subtle nod, others are more overt: things like dressing your Labubu in a branded outfit or trying to win the F1 x Bape helmet.
It’s feeling much more maximalist and like Gen Z is pushing back on the quiet luxury trend. Graphic tees are also making a bit of a comeback, if they ever left. While I don’t predict we’ll be seeing people wearing luxury logos splashed on $300 t-shirts just yet, it does give us another opportunity to think about how brands can help people express themselves and show their love for something through fashion and accessories.
I think that’s why things like Spotify’s FC Barcelona jersey takeovers keep growing in popularity and why we’ll continue to pursue other partnerships like Acne: because they help us bring fans closer to the artists they love, and that’s a powerful role for us to play.
Michelle: Any hobbies or random skills you have?
Wes: I make very good scrambled eggs, or so I’m told. I’m also not too bad at making the omelette from The Bear.
Michelle: What's something that got you excited recently (work or personal)?
Wes: Lorde’s new album, Virgin, really blew me away and I cannot stop talking about it. It’s such a thoughtfully created album with a clear storyline and a well-crafted journey. Yes, the singles work as standalones but they are so much more powerful in the context of the album as a whole. I think it’s a good example of why artists shouldn’t need to churn out work to be successful and why we as listeners should make the effort to listen to something start to finish, in order. You still might not like every track (with Virgin I do, by the way), but at least you can understand and appreciate the vision.
It’s also one more artist and album defying convention: the tracks are not forced into arbitrary lengths, the sound is cohesive and current but it’s not produced to sound like any other album or track on the charts right now. Charli XCX’s brat and Addison Rae’s self-titled album are two other great examples of what happens when artists shrug convention and make the art they want to hear in the world.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how Lorde’s been marketing Virgin. From popping up in Washington Square Park to doing a full pop-up set at Glastonbury and pairing the tracks with movie-like clips on Spotify (I do need a visual album now, I fear) the marketing feels more like it’s coming from a new artist rather than a global superstar, and that feels very in keeping with Virgin’s theme of rebirth.
Michelle: What's something most people don't know about you?
Wes: I don’t keep secrets and will happily spill my life story to anyone who will listen. But people always seem to enjoy finding out I played saxophone and that doesn’t come up in conversation as often so let’s go with that!
Michelle’s key takeaways:
Re: The value of Comms Planning: SOOOOO many agencies and in-house marketing teams do NOT have a comms planning function, and IMO this is a massive missed opportunity. I think this is mostly because people don’t understand the value of the function or why it’s needed.
The biggest value that Comms Planning brings is activating the idea across the channels in memorable and creative ways. As Wes said, “Comms Planning uses the understanding of consumer and message context to make sure people feel something, not just know something, about our brands.”
The reason comms planning is such a needed function is because media has fragmented wildly and the path an idea can find its way to a consumer is infinite. You need to have an intimate understanding of the audience’s media habits, but not just that, what they disproportionately love, and then find strategic and creative ways to express the ideas through those channels. The trick is that it might not be a media channel at all. It might mean inventing a new media channel or activating an interesting partnership that drives an unfair share of attention. You can start to see how comms planning can influence the idea just as much as bring it to life.
In addition to Wes’ awesome frameworks, here’s a Comms Planning brief I used when I worked at Mediahub if you need a starting point.
Re: Establishing a new discipline: I loved your Pollinatr pun Wes. ☺️ Leading through influence is the big takeaway from what Wes shared. You’re not in charge of final decision making on either side, but the glue that holds the plan all together and makes it lock-tight. This was one of my fav quotes: “It’s your job to help the storytellers bring those stories to life in systems, and it’s also your job to help the systems thinkers understand why the story, or at least key parts of it, are important.”
Another important ingredient for this from my experience is exec buy-in, not just theoretically, but tactically. The reason being is comms planning inherently changes the creative process. The best time to bring a comms planner in is at the BEGINNING, not after the fact to retrofit the idea into a comms strategy. By nature of this, the head of Creative (and other key decision makers) need to be majorly on board and constantly advocating for this work.
Re: the rise of fandom fits and the maximalist era. We’ve talked about the maximalist era a bunch lately in The Pollinatr with people going Delulu for Labubus and the Butter Girl Summer trend. This is a great opportunity for brands to embrace the “more is more” mindset (as long as it doesn’t fly in the face of your brand strategy) and double down on giving new ways for your audience to rep your brand, like Spotify’s FC Barcelona jersey or kit as they call them.
Wes, it was lovely catching up and reminiscing on our fond media planner days - I miss working together! You are killing it at Spotify and I’m so proud of you. Also, The Pollinatr community must know your scrambled eggs secret, do tell! 🍳
Insights and ideas to ponder
Inspo to keep your echo-chamber broken and creativity flowing. ✨
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📸 This was a subtle but incredible way to drive interest in a movie. Annie Leibovitz shot a series of astounding photographs of Anne Hathaway posing in front of paintings at the Met and Whitney with clothes that alluded to the paintings themselves, along with beautiful portraits of her in cascading gowns in the middle of Central Park. I saw these pictures pop up in a few different places and was drawn to know more. This is how I learned that A24’s Mother Mary, starring Anne, following the relationship between a fictional musician and a famous fashion designer, will be coming out this year. Smart.
💦 Quiet luxury gets loud and brands get smart with summertime activations. Brands like D&G, Burberry, and Missoni are popping up at oceanside hotels decking out their pool lounges and decor that are dripping with their iconic prints.
🥵 Speaking of summertime ideas, I have a new media tactic for you: tan line marketing! But really, some brand please do this.
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🍑 It’s been hot girl summer, BRAT girl summer, tomato girl summer, sardine girl summer, and butter girl summer. I wonder if these coined terms are for marketers to have something to talk about, or if they actually point to an underlying desire for culture to have shared moments again?? Either way, I want to know, when it is going to be peach girl summer?! My fav juicy summertime app is nothing more than fresh peaches and burrata. Add some S&P and basil and voila, YUM!!!
Thanks for reading! Forward to a coworker to make you look smart. 💁🏼♀️
🐝 Michelle