Season’s Greetings! The holiday season is upon us and along with all the goodwill and cheer comes the stress about getting the perfect gift for your picky loved ones. We all know it can be overwhelming, but lucky for you, Pandora’s data is here to help! Check out our data-backed holiday gift recommendations below!

The Data

In order to determine the best gifts this season, we conducted a data deep dive based on our billions of interactions. We dug into three unique proprietary data types for this analysis:

How did we come to our recommendations?

To get a behind-the-scenes look at the data mining that powered our results, here’s how we analyzed the High Tech Dads.

• Step One: Glean Insights from Their Music Preferences We can infer a lot based on the music that people listen to, such as their activities, state of mind, and life stage. Pandora's Audience Explorer tool surfaces these types of insights on our audience segments at scale. After analyzing this data, we were able to determine that these high-tech dads have a passion for cooking.

• Step Two: Analyze Their Listening Habits Once we knew what activities they like, we then moved on to their moods. Our Data Science team compared listening habits during the holidays to listening habits throughout the rest of the year and found that these dads were happier and more chill during the holidays.

• Step Three: Ask Them Directly After we had all of this information, we went straight to the source. We surveyed our High Tech Dads using our Soundboard panel and discovered what matters most to them during the holidays. And voila – a gift recommendation emerged.

So, there you have it. The proof is in the figgy pudding.

Key Takeaways

For marketers looking to improve their campaigns during this holiday season, here are our key takeaways:

• It’s easy to get lost in the noise during the holiday season, but creating a data-backed creative strategy that is personalized to listeners can help you stand out from the crowd. In fact, we learned from this study that 56% of consumers want personalized and relevant ads.
• Pandora has the data and scale to unlock insights to make sure you are effectively personalizing your holiday campaigns for your target audiences.
• The holiday season can put people into unique moods: reflective, happy, or even anxious. Recognizing that listeners are in a particular mood and connecting with them on an emotional level will help make your message resonate. Read more about how to connect with listeners using mood here.

Sources: Soundboard Study, Internal Listener Data, Audience Explorer