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We are in Coachella land, at least on the digital end of it. This week's edition is dedicated entirely to the festival: it’s origins, the brand strategy, the activations, the spectacle, and what it all means for the people in this community who think about these things for a living. Everything in this edition is free and open to everyone!

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From Financial Suicide to Cultural Institution

Coachella was not originally supposed to be this, when co-founders Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen launched the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in October 1999 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, the ambition was considerably more modest. Tollett wanted to build an American answer to the great European festivals, Glastonbury, Reading, the kind of event where curation mattered more than charts. His original instinct was to combine artists who were not necessarily chart successes and let the programming itself be the magnet.

The inaugural festival headlined Beck, Tool, and Rage Against the Machine, drew roughly 37,000 people over two days, and lost Goldenvoice approximately $850,000. Tollett later called the decision to announce the festival just two months out "financial suicide." The festival skipped 2000 entirely while Goldenvoice fought to stay solvent.

Twenty-five years later, that scrappy desert experiment is the most commercially valuable music festival footprint in the world. The 2017 festival drew 250,000 people and grossed $114.6 million. Today, the festival draws more than 125,000 people a day across two consecutive weekends in April. But what has made Coachella genuinely remarkable from a marketing and communications standpoint is not the attendance figures; it is the way the festival became something brands pay tens of millions of dollars to be associated with, not because it reaches a mass audience in the traditional sense, but because of what that audience does with what it sees.

How Coachella Became a Brand Investment Opportunity

The shift happened gradually, then all at once. In Coachella's early years, brand presence was relatively conventional: sponsorships, banners, official partnerships. What changed was the rise of social media and the realization that Coachella attendees were some of the most prolific and influential content creators in the world before that language even existed.

The metric that clarified everything was earned media value, a framework that many of you reading this newsletter will be familiar with. It quantifies what organic attention would cost if a brand had to purchase it through paid advertising. That logic became the playbook: build an experience compelling enough that the people inside it become your distribution channel. A few numbers that put this in perspective:

This is an arms race in experiential marketing that the industry now openly calls "Brandchella." Brands don’t really show up as sponsors, but rather as headliners in their own right and the activations have grown more elaborate every year:

According to CreatorIQ, the creator marketing strategies that have generated the most consistent success at Coachella have been designed around crafting immersive experiences for creators without issuing overly restrictive guidelines for the resulting content. Brands that set strict posting requirements for the influencers they invite have consistently underperformed compared to those that create environments and step back.

The saturation is real and growing, though. The total earned media value generated by beauty and fashion brands during the first weekend fell from $52.63 million in 2024 to $40.8 million in 2025, a signal that as more brands crowd the space, the returns for any individual brand become harder to justify. The question of whether the investment still yields outsized returns is one the industry is actively renegotiating.

Weekend One, 2026: The Festival at 25

Coachella 2026 is the festival's 25th edition, and the lineup, Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, and Karol G as headliners, reflects just how far the festival has drifted from its indie rock origins, but that’s no surprise. In more recent years, Coachella's cultural authority comes from its ability to read what a moment demands and program accordingly. Right now, the moment is pop, maximalism, and spectacle.

Sabrina Carpenter opened the weekend on Friday in a way that felt almost purpose-built for the Brandchella era. She had called her shot two years earlier during her 2024 Coachella set, telling the crowd "see you back here when I headline," and returned to do exactly that with a full-scale Hollywood-themed production she had been building for seven months. The set transformed the main stage into a makeshift Hollywood Hills, complete with a "Sabrinawood" sign, celebrity cameos from Sam Elliott, Susan Sarandon, and Will Ferrell, and a finale that saw Carpenter exit the stage in a vintage car as a fountain went off below her. It was a 90-minute argument for her status as one of pop's biggest performers, and it landed.

The weekend was not without its complications. During her set, Carpenter mistook a fan's Arabic celebration call, known as a Zaghrouta, for a yodel, responding "Is this Burning Man? What's going on? This is weird," before later apologizing and acknowledging she could have handled it better. The moment moved quickly across social media, a reminder that Coachella's scale cuts both ways. The same platform that amplifies a perfect brand moment amplifies an imperfect one just as fast.

Saturday night belonged to Justin Bieber, he kept the production stripped down, opting out of elaborate set pieces and choreography in favor of appearing alone on stage in a hoodie and jeans, a stark contrast with Friday night's headliner. The most talked-about moment came about an hour in, when Justin positioned a MacBook center stage and spent nearly 30 minutes singing along to old videos he searched on YouTube, mixing performance clips with early 2010s viral memes, at one point running into buffering issues while the "Sorry" video stalled.

Reaction online was immediate and polarized: critics called it the worst performance in the event's history, while supporters defended it as an intentional and personal moment given his extended absence from live performance. Whether it reads as avant-garde or underprepared probably depends on where you were standing, but it is the kind of moment that will be discussed long after the desert dust settles, which is, arguably, its own version of the Coachella effect.

Karol G closes out the weekend tonight as the first Latina headliner in Coachella history, a milestone the festival's own brand story will be telling for years.

Were You at Coachella This Year?

If you or your team worked on a brand activation, campaign, or any Coachella-adjacent project this weekend, we want to hear about it. We are putting together a community roundup of what the PRGM community worked on at and around the festival, and we would love to feature your work. Send us a note at [email protected] with a brief description of what you worked on and we will take it from there.

Rhode World Pop-Up: Invite-Only Desert Activation

Hailey Bieber's skincare brand used her husband's headlining slot as the launchpad for Rhode's first Coachella event. The invite-only activation on April 11 introduced three new products from the Rhode x The Biebers collaboration, with Spotwear-themed games, a Cash App claw machine, a Sephora-sponsored touch-up room, and PATRÓN pouring drinks.

Airbnb x Sabrina Carpenter: Sabrina's Pit Stop

Airbnb partnered with Friday's headliner on a roadside pop-up open to the public along Highway 111 in Indio, offering photo ops, signature frozen drinks, limited edition merchandise, and surprise activations. The partnership was public-facing, not invite-only, which made it a different kind of bet from most Coachella activations, built for reach rather than exclusivity.

818 Outpost: Kendall Jenner's Tequila Compound

Now in its fourth year, the 818 Outpost has become one of the festival's most anticipated off-site activations. This year's design pulled from Mid-Century Googie architecture and space-age retrofuturism. KAYTRANADA headlined. Cash App hosted an interactive poolside experience. Postmates ran an immersive food garden with some of LA's most recognizable trucks.

Revolve Festival: The Grand Revivre

Now in its ninth year, Revolve's invite-only mini-festival ran on April 11 in Thermal with Don Toliver, Mustard, and Kehlani on the lineup. The theme this year was a bygone carnival era. Affirm hosted a game station. PopSockets ran a DIY Grip Bar. DC Studios brought an immersive Supergirl lounge. Revolve Festival is a great example of a brand building its own parallel event rather than sponsoring someone else's.

Red Bull Mirage: The 20,000 Square Foot Three-Story Hub

Back for its second year after debuting in 2025, the Red Bull Mirage sits directly across from the Quasar stage and operates as a multi-level social destination with curated DJ sets, pop-up experiences, and Nobu Omakase dining for reservation holders. Red Bull texted real-time alerts for surprise activations to anyone who signed up.

That's a wrap on this weekend’s Coachella edition. Whether you were in the desert this weekend or watching from your couch, we hope you enjoyed. We'll be back next Sunday with our regular cadence, and there are some conversations and interviews coming that we think you're really going to enjoy!

See you then. 🖤

Kindly Circling Back Forever,
Fatou & The PRGM Post Team

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