How Coachella Influenced the Influencer Marketing Economy for Music Festivals
Coachella has gone on to become one of the most renowned cultural events in the world and, thanks to its audience of celebrities and social media stars, evolved into a marketing megaphone for brands wanting to tap into its global reach.
Taking place in the Coachella Valley in Indio, California, Coachella is perhaps the biggest music festival in the world when it comes to marketing. The festival, which pulls in some of the biggest artists in the world as headliners, and in turn pulls in nearly 100,00 people a day (the festival is spread across two three-day weekends), Coachella is a trendsetter for the fashion industry as major fashion brands leave no stone unturned to showcase their new clothing lines at the festival through influencers.
Brands that showcase their new lines of clothing on Coachella often provide the complete Coachella experience for influencers. That includes VIP tickets, high-end villas and all the cocktails you can drink. Grazia Netherlands, for example, sends the biggest Dutch influencers to the festival. Anna Nooshin, Lizzy van der Ligt, Maan and others were all staying at a massive villa in Indio and got to wear the newest festival outfits of the Amsterdam based clothing brand, Alix the Label. Consequently, the label received lots of (inter)national attention after the intensive marketing efforts in California.
But why is it that Coachella leads the charge for setting fashion trends and the influencer industry? To begin with, Coachella is the highest grossing recurring festival of all time with a total income of $115.32 million. This is due to Coachella attracting a large number of sponsors, ranging from American Express, Amazon, Absolut, Calvin Klein, Google Pixel, HP, Uber, YouTube Music and many more. When these sponsors/partners come on board, the main attraction for them becomes the people who attend Coachella. The festival’s urban millennial population that is spread across different socio-economic backgrounds is the perfect audience profile for these brands. For example, HP, which is Coachella’s official technology partner, had an 11,000 square foot Antarctic Projection Dome that displayed 360-degree visuals, accompanied by a performance from electronic music act Rufus Du Sol while a specially shot film played in the background. Daryl Butler, HP’s head of Consumer Marketing in an interview said:
“At Coachella, you have north of 100,000 people into everything from tech to music to art to fashion. And then the advent of social media has allowed what happens in a narrower experience to be broadcast around the world. The audience make up of Coachella is broad, but the sweet spot is the young millennial and up and coming Gen Zs. HP has established itself with the older millennials, Gen Y, Gen X and the like. We now have a new opportunity to invite a new audience to understand HP’s contribution to tech.”
Aside from official Coachella sponsors like H&M, Jimmy Choo, and Sephora, brands often create marketing opportunities by sponsoring things that festival-goers actually need. Uber, for example, constructed the Uber Lounge that includes a place for ride-sharing customers to charge their phones and grab a drink of water while waiting for their driver. POPSUGAR, a fashion and entertainment news publisher, is offering fashion D.I.Y. stations and personal brand-building sessions with a “social media video director” to help visitors create the perfect videos for their Instagram and Snapchat accounts.
Music festivals like Coachella represent a powerful marketing opportunity for brands, especially through influencer marketing partnerships. Because the followers of social media stars who attend Coachella will likely see every photo, video, or Snapchat Story that digital stars post during the festival, campaigns at Coachella are guaranteed to be seen by millions of consumers, liked, and shared within followers’ own social media circles. Coachella’s reputation as a “see-and-be-seen” event makes advertising at the festival an effective way for brands to cement a “cool” brand identity among trend-setting, fashion maven attendees as well. By offering free products or branded experiences to festival-goers (who are perpetually capturing and sharing every experience on social media platforms), companies can establish a reputation for catering to and being endorsed by the most beautiful, fashionable, and aspirational social media influencers.
