The 5 Biggest Instagram Marketing Trends from Coachella 2019
Coachella is not merely a place where the young and restless go to watch their favorite artists perform.
Over the years, the festival has morphed into a massive laboratory of sorts for marketers, exclusive events and creative branded partnerships that get everyone excited.
Music and creativity have a unique coming together at Coachella, earning it the rightful moniker of “The Super Bowl of Instagram advertising”.
Why is Coachella so important for brands?
Over 100,000 people visit Coachella’s grounds every day of the festival. An overwhelming majority of these people are millennials with disposable income. Estimates put the average spending of a Coachella-goer at anywhere from $625 to over $2,400 if you factor in air-fare.
Since the event has a lot of prestige attached to it, most of the festival visitors are more than happy to share their pictures and videos from Coachella online. This year, as is tradition, there are millions of posts on Instagram with the hashtag #coachella.
It’s easy to see why brands would want to be exposed to this demographic. Branded hashtags and event partnerships often turn out to be the most memorable parts of the festival. With people sharing photos from the festival so frequently, it offers brands a way to reach out to people who aren’t attending live but still want to vicariously experience the event.
As the years go on, marketing at Coachella is evolving. Brands are influencers are creating more unique and immersive experiences for festival goers.
Let us take a look at the five biggest trends emerging from Coachella 2019.
1. Photo and video collages are in vogue.
Collages are back in a big way at Coachella this year. They’re showing up on feeds, Stories and even IGTV videos. This is likely to trickle into other Instagram marketing campaigns in 2019.
Revolve partnered with StoryLuxe to create some exclusive templates for Coachella 2019, and they allowed people to capture multiple moments at once.
With the sheer amount of activity and noteworthy things happening at a festival like Coachella, it makes sense that you would want to include multiple pictures at once in a post.
2. Tech brands are stepping up in a big way.
For the first time at Coachella, technology brands really upped their game and overshadowed fashion brands.
Bose, one of the major sponsors of the event, took some cues from Coachella’s fashion roots and built an incredible AR audio experience with Bose Frames. They even worked with Coachella to add some features from Bose AR into the official festival app.
Festival goers had the ability to enjoy exclusive content from the app while wearing Bose Frames. And judging from the delighted reactions people had, it was a big hit.
HP created a mind-boggling 360-degree projection experience called the Antarctic. Google Pixel 3 collaborated with Childish Gambino to create a surreal multimedia experience between stages.
3. Dedicated spots for Instagrammable pictures are a big hit.
One of the major things on the minds of everyone who visits Coachella is taking brilliant pictures that they can post to Instagram and other networks. This is why brands are taking notice and providing people with fun places to get iconic shots, such as in front of the Coachella Ferriss wheel.
Branded events and tents are still a thing, but there are some brands now going above and beyond to extend their aesthetic to both in-event and outside the festival grounds to help people capture memorable shots.
This year was also the first time Instagram hosted a branded house at Coachella – the Instagram Desert Chill House – a 1970s style desert themed place where people could chill and take photos with funky color palettes in the background.
4. Experiential marketing is on the rise.
Experiential marketing is a growing trend among businesses looking to reach wider audiences on digital platforms, and Coachella is a perfect place for hosting an experiential event.
The idea behind this type of marketing is to create an experience that is moving for the customer and through that experience, creating some affinity or loyalty towards a brand. Studies have shown that millennials value experiences more than things.
And there were plenty of great experiences to choose from this year – Revolve with a massive party, Pantene and NYX with their beauty lounges and themed tents like Heineken House and Absolut Planet.
5. More and more brands are collaborating to host massive events.
Studies show that more than 75% of people who visit a festival show more affinity for a brand that sponsors the event.
However, sponsoring a gigantic event like Coachella is very expensive. This is why we see brands partnering up to split the cost and also to benefit from each other’s audiences.
Levi’s, for example, teamed up with Australian beauty brand Bondi Sands to sponsor the Neon Carnival at Coachella. Revolve collaborated with Virgin Voyages to build a nice place for people to chill and hangout at the festival.
From branded collaborations to exclusive events and creative marketing strategies, Coachella has it all. As a brand looking to market on Instagram, Coachella is an absolute must-watch as a tool to understand what the next big ideas in marketing are.
We hope this article sparks a few ideas for you and that you can use them to grow your Instagram community.