EOY 2026 planning
Your customers are expecting a year in review this December.
Three years ago a personalized year-end recap was a novelty. Now every app your customer opens ships one, and 200 million people opened Spotify Wrapped in its first 24 hours last December.
The category is settled. The only open question is whether you are in it. Here are ten campaigns worth studying, the two that failed publicly and why, and what has to be true for yours to land.
is the day the window opens, and it is now the most contested date in the marketing calendar. Apple Music Replay 2025 launched December 2, one day ahead of Spotify on purpose. Amazon Music, YouTube Music and Deezer all dropped inside the same 48 hours. Production runs six to eight weeks, so a December drop is an October decision.
The format is the same. The rules just changed.
Year-end recaps are now expected from every app a person opens, which means the bar for what wins moved up. Three shifts the brands paying attention already made.
AI slop is the new red line.
Spotify learned this in 2024 with AI-narrated podcasts and machine-named genres. Users called it slop. The 2025 analog mixtape redesign was a deliberate retreat, and it worked.
"Slop" was Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year. Mentions of "AI slop" rose 200% year over year in 2025.
Read the room, or get reviewed yourself.
LinkedIn shipped its first Year in Review in December 2025, into the worst job market since 2020. The recap counted logins and applications for people who had spent the year not getting hired.
CNN: "LinkedIn 'Wrapped' is reminding people just how crummy the job market is."
The December 1 window is contested.
Everyone now aims at the same 48 hours. If you launch into that wall without a reason to be there, you are buying attention at the worst possible moment. Going early or going later is a real strategy.
200M+ Spotify users opened Wrapped in the first 24 hours of the 2025 drop. Everyone else competed for what was left.
Ten campaigns worth studying.
Each one started a conversation, moved a measurable behavior, or raised the bar for what a personalized year-end moment can be. Take what is reusable. Ignore the budgets. Screens below are the real recipient experience wherever one could be sourced, credited to the publisher.
Spotify Wrapped
2025 editionThe one that made the category. 200M+ users in the first 24 hours, 500M shares, share growth up 41% year over year. The 2025 analog mixtape redesign scrapped the AI features that had drawn fire the year before, and the numbers went up.
Retreating from AI was the growth decision, not the safe one.
Duolingo Year in Review
2025 editionA ten-page recap with a learning-style profile and the streak as hero. The voice does the work: it teases you the way the app does all year, so the recap feels like the same character rather than a marketing artifact.
Your recap should sound like your product, not like your brand guidelines.
Strava Year in Sport
2025 edition, 12th annualTwelve years running, which makes it the longest-lived recap on this list and proof the format compounds. The Chipotle partnership expanded to 25 markets, with 9.25M+ miles logged on Chipotle segments in a single year.
A recap people expect annually becomes a partnership asset you can sell.
Reddit Recap
2024 edition, no 2025 runThe voice was the whole product. Generic recap copy would have died on Reddit, so the recap talked like the site does. There was no 2025 edition, which is its own lesson: a recap people came to expect, then did not get, is a withdrawal rather than a saving.
Skipping a year costs more than running one, because the audience notices the absence.
Apple Music Replay
2025 editionReplay 2025 added Discovery, Loyalty and Comebacks, then launched December 2, one day ahead of Spotify, on purpose. The timing was the strategy: be the recap people see first.
The calendar is a creative decision. Someone should own it.
Peloton Year in Review
2025 edition, renamed "The Victory Lap"It lands in the inbox right before January resolutions, which is the most calculated timing on this list. Peloton also renamed it for 2025 and shipped a builder that lets members compose their own shareable card.
Time the recap to the decision it should influence, not to the calendar year.
Twitch Recap
2025 editionTwitch requires a minimum of 10 watch hours to qualify for a Recap. A gate looks like a cost until you realise it guarantees every recap that ships has something real in it.
Not everyone should get one. Thin data makes a thin recap and a worse impression.
Grammarly Year in Review
Discontinued after 2024For years this was productivity Wrapped at scale, billions of personalized year-in-review emails. There is no 2025 edition, and there will not be one: the parent company rebranded to Superhuman in late 2025. A campaign that ran for years can disappear along with the brand that ran it.
The recap belongs to the audience relationship, not the logo. Rebrands end campaigns.
Blinkist Year in Blinks
2023 edition, most recent runReading is a quiet habit. The recap made it visible, and the campaign is credited with 51% higher subscription renewals. It has run only three times since 2017, which makes the renewal lift more striking, not less.
The quieter the behavior, the more a recap is worth. People cannot share what they never see.
WHOOP Year in Review
2025 edition, newest on this listWHOOP runs two layers, and this is the most copyable structure on the list. A public article tells the aggregate story, how the whole community slept and trained, then hands off with "check out your 2025 Year in Review in the WHOOP app." The press story earns the attention. The personalized recap collects it. They also published on 8 December, a clear week after the Dec 1 scrum.
The closing line does the rest: "You may not have noticed the change, but WHOOP did." That is retention framed as recognition rather than as a renewal prompt.
Run the aggregate story in public and the personal one in the app. Tell someone you noticed. That is the product.
Two public failures, one lesson.
Both were shipped by companies with more resources than yours. Both went wrong in ways that had nothing to do with budget.
Spotify Wrapped 2024
The redesign leaned into AI narration and machine-invented genre names like "Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop." Users called it slop. It was the first Wrapped in years that made people feel handled rather than seen.
"There was more negative feedback than we've seen before. We just need to do better." Gustav Soderstrom, Spotify Chief Product Officer, on the 2024 edition
LinkedIn Year in Review 2025
LinkedIn tallied logins, days on platform and application counts, then shipped it into the worst job market since 2020. The data was accurate. The read of the moment was not.
"LinkedIn is reminding me that I was a top applicant for 28,388,338 jobs and landed 0." Users called it a participation trophy for unemployment. Representative user reaction, December 2025
Your audience is your distribution channel.
Every campaign above works the same way underneath. A person receives something built from their own year, and they carry it to an audience you never paid to reach. That is the whole mechanic. Here is what it takes to run one.
Built for the post that follows.
Every render is sized and finished for the post your audience would actually make. 9:16 for Reels and TikTok, 1:1 for LinkedIn, 16:9 where it belongs.
500 cards or 500,000.
Linear scale, same template, same brand quality. The ten thousandth render looks identical to the first, because it came off the same engine.
If it is structured, it is a story.
CSV, Airtable, REST API, your warehouse. We handle the data prep, the edge cases, and the long-name overflow that breaks template tools.
No new tool to learn.
Bring the moment, the data and the list. We handle design, render, QA and the delivery window. We did exactly this for Spotify Songwriter Wrapped.
Stop renting your audience.
The best campaigns on this list are just a company telling someone it noticed.
Read the room. Render the video. Do not launch the same day as Spotify. Production runs six to eight weeks, so if December is the target, the decision is an October one. Book early so the whole industry is not stacked into the same fortnight.
Images are the property of their respective owners and are reproduced here for editorial commentary, credited per figure. Spotify Wrapped 2025 figures from Spotify's 2025 Wrapped media kit and newsroom. "Slop" as Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 2025. LinkedIn reaction reporting via CNN, December 2025. Blinkist renewal figure from Phiture's published case study. Grammarly rebrand to Superhuman confirmed via the company's own announcement and coverage in Fast Company and TechCrunch. WHOOP figures and the closing quotation are from WHOOP's own Year in Review 2025 article on The Locker, published 8 December 2025. No usable recipient screen could be sourced for Strava or Reddit at publishable resolution; both entries run without a figure rather than with a substitute.
