Eight playlists, no timer on your phone and perfectly al dente pasta. The idea, on paper, seemed like a publicity stunt like many others, the type of initiative that is shared on social media and then forgotten. Instead, Barilla’s Timer Playlists, launched in collaboration with Spotify in January 2021, are still there, active and listened to.
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The mechanism is elementary: you have to throw the pasta into boiling water, press play on the playlist corresponding to the format and wait for the music to end, which will indicate that the pasta has been cooked. Without needing alarm clocks and eyes constantly focused on the clock. The project was conceived by the Publicis Italy agency and was born from a precise data, linked to Covid: in the first months of 2020, global searches on “how much to cook pasta” had grown by 50% compared to the previous year. The lockdown had brought millions of people back to the kitchen, often for the first time on a continuous basis, and pasta, apparently the simplest dish in the world, proved to be treacherous precisely in the details.
Eight playlists, four formats, four genres
The collections cover Barilla’s best-selling pasta shapes, namely spaghetti n. 5, linguine n. 13, fusilli n. 98 and penne rigate n. 73. Each corresponds to two playlists of different genres, for a total of eight. Times vary according to cooking: 9 minutes for spaghetti, 10 for linguine, 11 for fusilli and penne, while the genres range from pop to hip hop, from indie to the great classics.
The names — “Mixtape Spaghetti,” “Boom Bap Fusilli,” “Moody Day Linguine,” “Pleasant Melancholy Penne” — already work as a listening promise. The playlist covers, commissioned from eight internationally renowned Italian illustrators including Emiliano Ponzi, Van Orton and Mauro Gatti, transform each collection into a small visual object. The songs are updated periodically, so the playlist works as if it were new every time.
The numbers
In just the first two months of launch, the playlists recorded over 508,000 minutes of listening — corresponding, as Publicis Italy calculated, to around 140,000 pasta dishes cooked with the Playlist Timer. The campaign was selected for the 2021 D&AD Awards, one of the most authoritative awards in the creative communication sector.
The official Barilla website still cites playlists as a recommended tool for cooking: “Just drop your pasta in the pot, hit play, and when the music stops… pasta is ready!”
All playlists are available on the official Barilla profile on Spotify. The campaign sheet with performance data can be consulted on D&AD.
