Aren’t sponsors supposed to pay?

It might seem odd that Spotify sees its Coke tie-up as a distribution scheme, rather than advertising revenue. Coke isn’t paying Spotify, but it will do global marketing campaigns in support of its own branded app that lives on Spotify. And Coke rewards programs might include free trials of the music service, though Spotify’s clearly able to do that on its own via its ad-supported offering. You might remember MyCoke Music – I might be getting the branding a bit off – from a few years back. That was a Coke social marketing-digital music-virtual world-gaming web program that was ahead of its time and has since largely morphed into Coke’s other rewards programs. But this time it’s not clear what the Coke app actually does. And I’d be more impressed if Spotify were charging Coke and others for branded apps on its platform. Instead, it’s taking a Facebook company pages approach. Will brands buy ads to drive traffic to their Spotify apps?