Features

Festival season

Brittany Golob explores how brand sponsorships and partnerships help music festivals gain awareness and build memorable experiences.

Glastonbury. Coachella. Montreux Jazz Festival. Austin City Limits. Roskilde. It’s hard not to be even a little bit aware of the biggest music festivals in the world.

Rising to this stratosphere relies on a combination of factors including excellent music, world-class place branding and well-matched corporate partnerships. And, with everything in music, perhaps a little bit of luck.

On the map

Coachella – now a massive international event that draws the who’s who of Hollywood as well as a vast crowd of music fans over two weekends – started more humbly. Hoping to bring a sense of British weekend festivals to life in Southern California, concert promoters Rick Van Santen and Paul Tollett of Goldenvoice – a subsidiary of AEG – were helped along by fate. In 1999, rock band Pearl Jam wanted to book a gig outside of the Ticketmaster ecosystem. The then-little-known Empire Polo Club played host to the event.

It put the Coachella Valley on the music festival map.

The success of that one show showed Tollett and Van Santen how to work out the kinks to turn Indio, California into a major festival host. LA Times journalist Greg Boucher wrote at the time, “The event’s name purposely mentions the Coachella Valley to create a geographic anchor and, [Tollett] hopes, a lasting impression in the minds of fans.”

And it worked. A bit of serendipity, some meticulous planning, a careful curation of the fan experience and bam. A festival.

Place plays an incredibly vital role in building festival brands. Glastonbury itself is not actually in the town of Glastonbury, but capitalises on the nearby site’s heritage and renown.

Montreux Jazz Festival has become synonymous with the Swiss city itself. A sleepy town of 26,500, the lakeside city comes to life every summer when jazz musicians and fans descend on it in droves. Held in Montreux since 1967, the festival takes over the town, using its glorious setting as the backdrop for an incredible fortnight of music. While its typical home at the Montreux Convention Centre was out of service, the festival adapted by running headline events at the newly created Lake Stage.

In a press release, the Lake Stage was eulogised, “When we launched this crazy challenge of a stage on the lake, we didn't know whether our audience – used to the acoustics and comfort of our indoor venues – would follow us. This adventure has proved that the Festival can reinvent itself on totally different stages while remaining true to its soul and values.”

It seems the magic is in the place itself, not in the four walls in which the event often takes place. The release says, “In Montreux, there will always be a rare alchemy between a place, a history, an audience and its artists. An alchemy that fosters performances that are exceptional, intimate, organic and, at times, unpredictable.”

For festivals working towards these auspicious heights, place is important, but it’s only part of the package that allows for growth and development.

Mix and match

British Summer Time (BST) in Hyde Park has become a darling of the British summer of music. The UK is no stranger to festivals, having originated Glastonbury, Reading/Leeds, the Isle of Wight Festival and so many more. But BST is an unusual offering in a country more familiar with an overnight setup. The festival is actually a series of mini festivals, each day playing host to a different lineup and a different set of ticket holders all invited to kindly please leave each evening.

It has played host to the likes of Tom Petty, Taylor Swift, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, Adele and Neil Young.

But its success is partly down to its creative partnerships and marketing. Its headline sponsor is American Express, and actually, its official moniker is American Express presents BST Hyde Park. This partnership has evolved over the years, but allows Amex excellent hospitality opportunities, awareness building and a way to give back to cardholders. Simultaneously, BST gets a whole class of mini-influencers excited about exclusive pre-sales, special access and great perks.

Georgina Iceton, vice president - partnership activation at AEG Global Partnerships, is part of the team at AEG that brings BST to life every year. She says, “British Summer Time has its own brand identity that has a lot of value and brand equity in and of itself. American Express love associating themselves in alongside that, and integrating into everything that BST stands for. But they do that in terms of where they want to show up, rather than necessarily being involved in every single touchpoint across the festival.”

That partnership is to the benefit of both, Iceton says. It allows BST to act independently, gain clout with artists and build its own following among fans, while also benefitting from the support Amex naturally lends. For Amex, there is a separation built in, unlike there would be in the case of the festival named exclusively for the brand.

“When we cancelled [Jeff Lynne’s] ELO at BST, we took American Express out of those kind of crisis comms. It allows a degree of separation for some of the communication that's coming out of the festival,” says Iceton.

She also points to activations like Superdrug’s on-site beauty shop at BST or Billie’s Diner – a pop-up sponsored by Amex at a Billie Eilish gig at London’s O2 Arena – as ways for brands to craft immersive, interactive experiences that enhance the festival itself, without detracting from the acts on stage.

One of the keys to getting this right, Iceton says, is to align brand values carefully so that a brand is empowered to act like the most fun version of itself, fit into the festival landscape and enhance the fan experience. And fans are fans of the events as well. AEG research from this year's BST Hyde Park and All Points East shows that there was a 160% increase in festival attendees perceiving a brand partner as “exciting and fun” after interacting with them at a festival.

Similarly, AEG noted that 64% of fans would share their experience on social media after taking part in the brand activations on site, expanding the reach of the festival itself.

The best of friends

Partnerships are vital to the festival circuit. There would be no Coachella without the army of partnerships that sits beneath its umbrella. There would be no Glastonbury – nor indeed any internet access on site – without its corporate partners, the likes of which includes telecoms provider Vodafone.

Iceton says that Coachella’s model is to create a family of partners without any superseding the others. “Coachella has never had a naming partner, but you've got a number of principal partners that work alongside them. That allows you to segment the rights out rather than having one dominant brand. When they all sit alongside each other, they’re all as big or important as each other.”

But partnerships aren’t always a cure-all when it comes to putting festivals on the map. V Festival – named for the Virgin Group – ran in the UK from 1996 to 2017 and 2020. But, when Virgin decided to end its sponsorship, the festival suffered a reputational hit.

Joanna Alcock, brand and client development lead for experience marketing agency Seed, says, “V Festival shows how a corporate name can power growth, but also limit a festival’s evolution if the brand values don’t move with the culture. Virgin gave the festival scale and visibility, but over time, its heavy-handed branding felt at odds with shifting audience expectations. Once Virgin stepped away, the festival struggled to stand on its own – proving how dependent the brand had become on its corporate identity.”

She advises marketers to “think beyond visuals” when it comes to creating – and working with – festival brands. “Reputation, curation and values often matter more than design. Corporate partners should add value, not just visibility, and align with the festival’s purpose. Whether you're naming a stage, shaping an experience or attracting talent, branding must be felt across every detail.”

A brand that achieves this sense of alignment is the Co-op. Not only is it a known music supporter with an arena named for it in Manchester, but it sponsors the UK’s Latitude Festival as well. Its co-branded Co-op Stage offers a bespoke opportunity for name recognition. But it also promotes the festival as a membership perk.

The Co-op – by name and in practice a co-operative – is built on its members. Aligning a festival activation with its core purpose of driving value for members is a brilliant way to not only build awareness and brand love, but also deliver on one of its key business objectives.

Iceton says that in any partnership opportunity “it’s really important that we are all clear from the outset at what we're trying to achieve.”

Goldenvoice may not have known what it was trying to achieve back in 1999 at the birth of Coachella. It learned the good from Glastonbury, and the bad from Woodstock ’99. It carefully planned and curated the fan experience. And now, it plays host to a number of partners that help it thrive.

Music festivals can learn from this. It’s not enough to have a great location or a brilliant corporate partner or a smashing fan experience. It’s all three combined that make the Montreuxs of the world, the British Summer Times, truly rock.