Why influencer performance, not just reach, mattered more at Coachella this year

Thousands of influencers descended on the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival last week for the first weekend of the annual music festival—most with brand partners financing their trips or showering them in free products, as has become standard practice at the marquee influencer marketing event. But this year, beneath the usual glitz and curated content, brands were notably more selective. Marketers told Ad Age they prioritized creators whose Coachella content could deliver measurable reach and performance, signaling a more strategic and scrutinized approach to festival activations. “While everyone loves events like Coachella, they last the weekend and they’re over,” said Chris Anthony, chief revenue officer at media company Gallery Media Group, which hosted over 400 creators and influencers at its “Desert House” activation just beyond the festival grounds. “It’s hard for brands to sort of see the true ROI [return on investment] in that.” Gallery Media Group focused its activation this year on “getting as much content out of the event as possible” for its brand partners to post both during and after Coachella, Anthony said. Brands at the space included High Noon, Josh Cellars and U by Kotex, among others. Creators at the invite-only space (such as Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia and Mark Estes of the “Montana Boyz” creator group) collectively produced more than 500 pieces of social content for those brands during just the first weekend of Coachella across the exclusive parties and programming offered at Desert House, he said. Josh Cellars, for instance, kicked off Coachella weekend with a “get ready with me” party where attendees could touch up their makeup and coif their hair before walking over to the festival. “If you do any [activation] in person, do you absolutely need an influencer with you? I think for most brands, the answer is yes,” said Keith Bendes, chief strategy officer at influencer marketing agency Linqia. “You’re already spending so much money on the physical space that you should really have that add-on of an influential voice kind of driving everything. So, instead of just reaching 350 people on site, you’re reaching 350 people on site plus 350,000 people [on social].” Indeed, as of April 16, Coachella-related social content had garnered just under 82 million total engagements, equal to roughly $754 million in earned media value, according to data from Sprout Social. Social posts tied to this year’s Super Bowl, for comparison, generated 87 million total engagements, per Sprout Social. The hundreds of thousands of potential eyeballs on brands’ Coachella activations don’t mean much if their sponsored influencer content is lost in the annual avalanche of social posts tied to the music festival. That’s driving brands this year to prioritize partnering with creators and influencers who they predict will create high-performing Coachella content—namely, creators they’ve worked with before. “I do believe now more than ever, relationship [to the brand] is key, along with engagement and ROI,” when brands are selecting influencer partners for events such as Coachella, said Mia Kettler, senior talent manager at influencer management firm Digital Brand Architects (DBA). Neutrogena chose two of Kettler’s clients, Toni Bravo and Kyra Nikole, to attend Coachella with the brand for the second year in a row, likely due to the fact that the brand “saw their content do really well” at last year’s music festival, Kettler said. The performance of content captured by creators at Coachella generally skews higher, too—sponsored Coachella social content can garner three to four times the amount of engagement that a “regular one-off [sponsored] post” would, Kettler said. True Religion took a similar tack and centered this year’s Coachella influencer campaign on a group of influencers the apparel brand has long-term partnerships with, collectively known as “Team True,” said Kristen D’Arcy, True Religion’s chief marketing officer. Members of Team True include WNBA player Lexie Brown; fashion creator (and fiancée of Carolina Panthers linebacker Patrick Jones II) Michaela Flood; and Grammy-nominated R&B singer Kenyon Dixon, among many others. True Religion’s posts featuring its Team True influencers are “among the highest engaged across our social platforms,” D’Arcy said. On Instagram, those posts consistently outperform the brand’s average engagement rate of between 4% and 6%, she said. So, while nearly 10,000 people RVSPed to attend True Religion’s invite-only Coachella event, “Buddhafest,” D’Arcy said she ensured those creators were front and center in the brand’s social content captured at the festival. Additionally, the brand collaborated with Megan Thee Stallion, she said. True Religion outfitted her in several customized items from its new clothing collection with Ford, effectively ensuring the brand would appear in hundreds of organic posts from attendees filming Megan Thee Stallion’s Coachella performance. For its second Coachella activation, Pinterest similarly honed in on creators it knew would generate worthwhile engagement on their content surrounding the music festival. Influencer content “was a key driver of conversation around [Pinterest’s] overall presence at the festival” last year, said Sara Pollack, the company’s VP of global consumer marketing. Indeed, the highest-performing post from Pinterest’s Coachella campaign last year was a TikTok video from one of its influencer partners, Griffin Maxwell Brooks, which garnered a nearly 15% engagement rate, a Pinterest spokesperson said. Brooks was thus one of the five creators at the core of Pinterest’s Coachella campaign this year, along with Alani Figueroa, Achieng Agutu, Cierra Wright and Berenice Castro, the latter of whom Pinterest has also previously worked with, Pollack said. “When we find an influencer who has that mix of personality, but also that sort of creativity and craft … those are the influencers that we tend to repeat working with,” she added. Pinterest’s decision to begin activating at Coachella last year was also fueled by data, she said. In 2024, the platform noticed a spike in the number of searches for Coachella-related content, such as outfit inspiration, on the platform—a trend that was particularly prevalent among Pinterest’s target Gen Z audience, Pollack added. This year, in the weeks leading up to the music festival, searches for “Coachella aesthetic outfit” on Pinterest surged 769% year-over-year, according to a Pinterest blog post. In response to that trend, the platform centered its Coachella activation this year around Gen Z’s interest in music festival fashion inspiration, identifying trends such as “main pop girl” and “dark ethereal” and inviting festival goers to receive style tips for their preferred style in Pinterest’s space at Coachella, Pollack said. The company also partnered with Ramisha Sattar, the creative director for Gen Z-favorite artist Chappell Roan, to design its activation. Roan herself dropped by the activation, too. International Delight, like Pinterest, partnered with “a mix of new creators and top performers from last year” for its Coachella activation, said Jennifer Michuda, senior director of creamers at Danone North America, in an email. International Delight also opted to work with influencers at Coachella this year due to the success it saw from its partners at last year’s music festival, she added. Nurturing existing relationships with creators and forging new ones were the primary focus of Bloom Nutrition’s Coachella activation, too, said Jillian Freeborn, the brand’s head of influencer marketing. Bloom worked with experiential marketing agency CNC on a delivery truck and dropped off Bloom products, such as its energy drinks, to more than a dozen rental houses and hotels where influencers were staying, Freeborn said. Some influencers who received the Bloom deliveries had active contracts with the brand; others had never worked with Bloom but reached out via DMs asking about collaborating at Coachella, she said. The posts those creators made about their Bloom deliveries collectively received 4 million views, a brand spokesperson said. A new era of Coachella Even Revolve, one of the first brands to partner with influencers at Coachella, shifted its influencer strategy toward performance this year. The fashion retailer only invited about 400 influencers and celebrities to its exclusive “Revolve Festival” party this year, said Raissa Gerona, Revolve’s chief brand officer. Revolve has been hosting the invite-only event since 2013, and in previous years, the brand has extended invitations to more than 1,000 influencers and celebrities, Gerona said. “We definitely cut back this year,” she said. “I think we’ve been more thoughtful with making sure that each creator and talent that’s there is … [someone who is] inspiring our community. And when you go really big, it’s hard to manage expectations and it’s hard to ensure that they have the best time.” Put differently, Revolve sought to create an environment at Revolve Festival that would encourage attendees to produce engaging social content, although none of the guests were required to make any posts, Gerona said. Revolve Festival attendees this year included high-profile influencers such as Alix Earle, Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, Vinnie Hacker and Ariana Greenblatt, along with celebrities including Julia Fox, Cara Delevingne, and the artist Lisa. Revolve also chose performers for its party who the brand believed would generate the most online buzz across the largest range of consumers, she added, including rapper Cardi B and DJ Uncle Waffles. “We wanted to have that lineup that people are so into that it’s hard to not have a good time, and also not want to share that good time on social,” she said. 818 Tequila, which has activated at Coachella since 2023, similarly overhauled its approach to its invite-only “818 Outpost” event this year, said Kathleen Braine, CMO of Calabasas Beverage Company, the parent company of both 818 Tequila and Sprinter Vodka Soda. The brands were founded by Kendall and Kylie Jenner, respectively. For the past two years, 818 had structured its Outpost activation as a pop-up, where people were quickly shuffled through after picking up free products from 818 and other brand partners at the space, Braine said. This year, the brand greatly expanded the Outpost’s footprint and “engineered the space for lounging around and staying,” which encouraged the more than 1,500 people who stopped by to stick around and create content, she said. Ultimately, “intimacy and authenticity,” as a Poppi spokesperson put it, were the theme across brands’ Coachella influencer activations this year. Poppi, which last year centered its Coachella campaign entirely on Alix Earle, this year went for a “BBQ-style kickback” with around 50 attendees—including Post Malone, an investor in the brand, and two brand fans who won a social media sweepstakes.

Why influencer performance, not just reach, mattered more at Coachella this year

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