Yosef | Oct 13, 2026
Every December, Spotify turns each user’s listening data into a personal recap, and the internet fills with screenshots of it. Spotify Wrapped is the clearest proof that people love seeing their own year reflected back to them. The format is not owned by music. Any brand sitting on a year of customer data can run the same play.
This post covers why Wrapped works, the numbers behind it, and how brands are already running their own year-in-review video campaigns, with results to match.
It is personal, visual, and shareable, and it arrives at a moment when people are already reflecting on the year. Wrapped turns a database of listening history into a story about the one subject every customer cares about: themselves.
The reach backs it up. Spotify reported that Wrapped 2025 reached 200 million engaged users in about 24 hours, a 19 percent year-over-year increase, where an engaged user is someone who viewed at least one story. In 2024, reaching 200 million took roughly 62 hours. Shares rose 41 percent year over year to around 500 million, counting native shares, downloads, and screenshots.
The format is now its own category. Apple Music Replay and YouTube Music Recap both launched in 2019, and Amazon Music added its own recap in 2024. When your customers expect a year-in-review, the only question is whether they get one from you or only from everyone else.
The mechanics that make Wrapped work are the same ones that make a recap a genuine marketing asset. Three things do the heavy lifting.
Blings has built year-in-review Smart Videos with dozens of companies across hospitality, sports, retail, and more. Three campaigns show how closely the results track the Wrapped thesis.
Wyndham Hotels & Resorts turned its year-end guest email into a personalized, interactive travel recap that showed each guest their milestones and asked about next year’s preferences. The campaign lifted email click-through 75 percent and reached a 66.7 percent survey completion rate, against a 19 percent industry average and the roughly 81 percent survey abandonment common in travel. The final call-to-action completed at 22 percent, more than double the 9.87 percent B2C average.
The Cleveland Cavaliers gave members a Wrapped-style recap of the team’s strong start to the 2024-25 season. It showed each fan’s games attended, points witnessed, steals, and personal win rate: the share of Cavs wins they saw from the arena. The video was timed to support membership renewals and ended with a prompt to share. It earned a 62 percent open rate and a 22 percent click-through rate. 84 percent of viewers watched to the end, and 53 percent shared their results with friends or family.
Macy’s applied the same recap idea to its Star Rewards program. The personalized mid-year rewards recap increased conversions 47 percent and lifted average order value, which shows the recap mechanic is not limited to the end of the calendar year.
Over the years, we have run this play with dozens of companies, and we know what separates a forgettable recap from one customers screenshot and share. Here is what it takes to make the best end-of-year video.
Planning your own end-of-year video? Our team will map out exactly what your campaign needs, from the data points to the share moment.
A recap is a story with a lot of numbers, and video carries both better than a static email. With Blings, the recap is a Smart Video: built once as a template and generated on each customer’s device at the Moment of Open, using the MP5 format, so a program with millions of customers does not produce millions of files. Each person sees their own year, pulled live from your data, and the same template powers next year’s edition. Build once, personalize forever.
For more on the format, see the Blings year-in-review overview.
A year-in-review campaign that turns each customer’s own data from the past year into a personalized, shareable recap, usually as a video. Brands in travel, sports, retail, and QSR run them around the end of the year.
Yes. In Blings campaigns, a Wyndham year-end recap lifted email click-through 75 percent, and a Cleveland Cavaliers season recap reached an 84 percent completion rate, with 53 percent of fans sharing their results.
Data you already hold: purchases, visits, points or miles, top categories, and milestones. The strongest recaps use roughly five to fifteen personal data points per customer.
Late December into early January, when customers are already reflecting on the year. Sports teams and loyalty programs can also time a recap to the end of a season or a renewal window.
By designing personal stat moments and a one-tap share to a social story. Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped drove roughly 500 million shares, and the same share mechanic turns a brand recap into organic reach.
