From the Coachella desert to the beaches of Croatia, the fields of Glastonbury to parks in London or Chicago, festival season is very much upon us. And while there was a lot of scepticism surrounding the fall of festival fashion and the potential of festival marketing post-pandemic, brands are finding alternative ways to harness the buzz, via new destinations, smaller, more niche festivals and festival-adjacent events, alongside the heavy hitters like Coachella and Glastonbury.
“Today, festivals aren’t just about the line-up — they’re cultural barometers, reflecting how people express themselves, connect and experience the world,” says Parisa Parmar, creative strategist at firm Attachment. “For brands, they offer something digital platforms can’t, an emotionally charged physical environment, packed with a spectrum of fans.” Whether it’s through influencer-led storytelling, music artist collaborations, pop-ups, experiential moments, or traditional sponsorships, success lies in understanding what festival-goers truly crave at festivals: personalisation, escapism and shareability, she adds.
Here’s a guide to some of the key festival brand destinations for 2025, and how brands are tapping in.
Coachella: Reach and return via influencers
Coachella kicked off the festival season in April, with a major edition buoyed by stellar performances from Lady Gaga, Charli XCX and Blackpink stars Jennie and Lisa. While there’s been speculation about the impact of Coachella for brands post-pandemic, and brands like Revolve have scaled back their activations, the festival’s media impact value (MIV) increased 35 per cent to $908 million this year compared to last, according to Launchmetrics. (MIV attaches monetary value to social media posts based on reach and engagement, to determine the impact of an event or brand moment.)
Coachella is a key destination for influencer marketing and brand activations. Brand activations at Coachella were sevenfold that of Glastonbury 2024, drawing five times more brand ambassadors, per Launchmetrics. In fact, influencers are the key drivers for brand impact at Coachella, rather than celebrities. Influencer voice was not only the most valuable voice at the festival, driving the highest proportion of MIV over celebrities, but also demonstrated the highest growth year-on-year, at 66 per cent, Launchmetrics says.
“Coachella has gained a different reputation [to other festivals], with an emphasis on visibility, influence and cultural currency. It’s a high-impact stage where brand presence is measured not just by onsite engagement, but by how far it travels online,” says Parmar. “With a hyper-curated crowd of influencers, creators and media, Coachella offers brands a rare chance to turn experiential activations into global content moments.”
Timing is everything at Coachella, as the event runs across two consecutive weekends, unlike other festivals. While 57 per cent of Coachella’s total MIV landed during the first weekend, brands that kept ambassadors posting throughout the festival were better positioned to sustain buzz. “As hype fades and competition thins out by weekend two, a steady influencer strategy becomes a brand’s best bet to stay visible,” Launchmetrics notes in its Coachella report.
Coachella holds a lot of potential, but can be challenging to crack for the first time for brands that aren’t native to LA. Cora Delaney, founder of London-based talent agency EYC, recalls an international retailer that activated at Coachella this time around, but found it didn’t drive the return they desired, because they didn’t have an established influencer network and weren’t familiar with the logistics of the festival.
LA-native brands did see a return on investment. Guess Jeans once again ran its Coachella influencer compound, housing talents including Madeline Argy, Quenlin Blackwell and Lila Moss throughout the weekend. The brand also hosted a star-studded impromptu Charli XCX afterparty following her performance on weekend one, attended by Lorde, Troye Sivan, Cara Delevingne and Gabbriette. The party was covered by every major press outlet, and the images secured millions of likes and engagements on socials.
Hailey Bieber’s Rhode also generated “significant buzz” by creating a “tactile, social-first experience” with mini photobooths dispensing free lip peptides, photo moments designed for instant virality and exclusive meet-and-greets with founder Bieber, says Parmar. The activation drove $1.4 million in MIV, per Launchmetrics.
Elsewhere, Sol de Janeiro broke new ground as Coachella’s first official fragrance partner, with a desert pop-up that encouraged guests to “cool off”, experiment with fragrance layering and co-star in custom music videos, Parmar adds. Meanwhile, Nike hosted a high-energy football cage match featuring some of the world’s up-and-coming players, hosted by Travis Scott — blending sport, style and celebrity into a cultural moment engineered for global attention. “Together, these activations signal that [Coachella] marketing is headed towards brand experiences that feel cinematic, sensorial and deeply social — engineered not just to be seen, but to be felt and shared,” she says.
Creating your own festival
This year, brands are creating their own offsite events and activations, adjacent to festivals like Coachella, to benefit from the buzz and the talent that’s in town, while curating their own crowd (and avoiding costly sponsorship fees).
H&M staged a 5,000-capacity festival in Downtown LA, just days before Coachella weekend one, to celebrate its Spring/Summer 2025 collection. The line-up featured Robyn, Doechii and Jamie XX, and all the dancers wore pieces from the edit. The audience was made up of well-known faces like Amelia Gray, Lisa Rinna, Dakota Fanning and Barbie Ferreira, plus international press (flown in for the occasion), alongside members of the public who’d signed up to an online ballot. These activations feel more aligned with a luxury brand event than a high street player, and perhaps are helping the retailer differentiate from members of the fast fashion cohort. The festival follows the blockbuster Charli XCX Brat concerts H&M staged in London and New York in late 2024, in the Copper Box Arena and Times Square, respectively, which garnered an “amazing” response on social media, according to H&M global creative director Jörgen Andersson.
“We decided we have a long history of working in the intersection of music and fashion, and today we know that intersection is more relevant than ever,” says Andersson. “I mean, music today is more fashion than fashion. We thought, what if we don’t just choose one big star like Charli, but we build our own line-up? We wanted to show our [range] with the curation. Music, like fashion, is not only about one genre, one style, it’s many styles, and it’s how you combine them and put them together.”
The dancers across the festival were dressed in pieces from H&M’s SS25 offering, which was inspired by LA in the ’60s. “After the event, I saw a TikTok of a girl who said it took her a few seconds to realise what she was actually watching was a catwalk expressed through dance,” Andersson says. “I think that’s the subtleness that you also want to have, that that that you want to say, how can we portray our clothes, our brand in a very contemporary, unique way?”
The Revolve Festival — which takes place adjacent to Coachella and has been running since 2015 — is arguably the blueprint for own-brand festivals. The 2025 edition featured performances from Lil Wayne and Cardi B, and drove $30 million in MIV, the highest of any brand at Coachella, per Launchmetrics. Celebrities in attendance included TikTok stars Charli D’Amelio and Alix Earle, plus Julia Fox and Blackpink’s Lisa. That said, Revolve has scaled back the size of the event in recent years, reducing capacity from 5,000 to 1,200 in 2024, “to save money for other activations” across the year, like the Miami Grand Prix, chief brand officer Raissa Gerona told Vogue Business last year. It has stuck to this smaller size (with approximately 1,500 guests this season) and has also pivoted the event to be more Gen Z focused since 2024, inviting more TikTokers as the Coachella audience changes and skews younger.
Brand-owned festivals like Revolve Festival and the H&M event are also an opportunity for fashion brands to curate cultural touchpoints beyond music, via food and beverage or wellness partners, demonstrating the brand’s universe to the consumer. Revolve Festival featured pop-ups from around 20 brands, including Kylie Jenner’s hard seltzer brand Sprinter and Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila. While the H&M festival featured iconic eateries from In-N-Out Burger to Pink’s Hot Dogs.
“We wanted to create a mini Downtown LA that played tribute to the whole city,” H&M’s Andersson says. “We feel we really celebrated the energy of the brand.” The plan looking ahead is to continue with these types of activations. “We’ve decided to be in music, and we’re going to stay in music with these kinds of events and more,” he adds.
Glastonbury: A hard nut to crack
Another one of the world’s most famous festivals, Glastonbury will take place at the end of June, with headline slots from Olivia Rodrigo, Neil Young and The 1975, as well as appearances from Doechii and Charli XCX. Increasingly, brands are inspired by Coachella marketing and want to target Glastonbury’s global audience in a similar way, EYC’s Delaney says. But unlike other festivals that welcome commerciality, Glastonbury famously doesn’t allow brand activations from any that’s not an official partner. And it selects a handful of partners each year, based on their company values and ethics, with a focus on sustainability and British heritage.
“Glastonbury is very strict on who they sign off. They only have a couple of brands each year. It’s always brands that really align with what they do, like Barbour,” Delaney says.
Some brands are lucky. SPF label Green People was approached by the British festival last year, and will be the official SPF partner for 2025, delivering 1,000 litres of SPF to be dispensed onsite (for free) across 38 locations. To secure the deal, however, they had to run organisers through the sustainability credentials and ethics of the business, to make sure it aligned with Glastonbury’s values, says marketer Jasmine Powell of JP Agency, who helped secure the deal. “They liked that [Green People] are an independent British brand. And the product had to be ocean friendly and dermalogically tested with no petrochemicals.” Green People started working on the project in October, Powell says. “We had to literally design five-litre bottles to minimise waste and to make sure that we were still being responsible. We had to do stability testing of the containers in [the Green People] factory for three months.”
For other brands who aren’t lucky enough to be chosen, all is not lost. Many mainstream labels from Hunter to Depop have found ways to align with Glastonbury in the past, via offsite activations and gifting creators. Examples include Hunter, which often activates with free ticket giveaways or nearby activations, like a welly-cleaning service at the train station for festival-goers to use en route home; or Benefit Cosmetics, which set up drive-thru brow and beauty bars also visible en route to the festival last year.
When it comes to gifting, as long as brands and creators don’t tag @Glastonbury or mention the festival in their content, they can still post about brands during the event. And because it’s so world renowned, brands still benefit from its cultural impact even without directly linking to it.
Delaney is working on a couple of brand projects during Glastonbury, but they will be done in a boutique camping site outside the venue — and Glastonbury won’t be mentioned in the content. “We’re working with quite a few brands to put gifting in all of the teepees and tents, for creators to organically post throughout the weekend, for example” she says. “It’s an interesting way to create organic content outside of the festival.”
“For brands, the rules make Glastonbury less about product placement and more about value alignment,” says Parmar. “It’s not the place to push sales, it’s the place to demonstrate shared purpose, cultural understanding and long-term commitment.”
Niche and local: The power of smaller festivals
While big festivals feature heavy competition and brand saturation, brands are aligning with smaller day festivals or genre-specific events to target specific consumers. While Coachella and Glastonbury are about reach and global scale, day festivals are more focused on particular communities. Take London pop festival Mighty Hoopla, which taps into nostalgia and queer culture (this year’s line-up features Kesha and Ciara); concert series British Summer Time (BST) Hyde Park, which often features throwback, iconic acts like Stevie Nicks or Neil Young, pulling an older crowd; East London festival All Points East, which attracts young millennials and Gen Zs from the local area; or genre-specific festivals like Stagecoach, which hones in on country music and Western aesthetics.
American Express is one of the most active brands across the festival circuit, via event sponsorship, special areas for cardholders, discounts and experiential pop ups. This year, Amex has partnered with Stagecoach, Coachella and Austin City Limits in the US and BST Hyde Park and All Points East in London. 60 per cent of the brand’s new customers are Gen Zs and millennials, and it’s found activating across both big and small festivals is the best way to reach them.
“We always ground our activations in culturally relevant insights and trends that we know our Gen Z and Millennial target audience are engaging with,” says Aaron Burke, VP Marketing, global brand sponsorships, American Express. “Festivals are a fiercely competitive space so we need to really connect with our audience in an authentic way.” In 2023, consumers were all about nostalgia, so Amex showed up at BST Hyde Park with a Y2K hair bar, offering styles that represented pop culture idols of that time. In 2024 it leveraged the trend for manifesting by creating a ‘Manifestation Station’, where festival-goers could manifest their ideal festival experience. Plans are under wraps for this summer, but the brand is planning another experiential moment at BST Hyde Park, Burke says.
“Smaller, day-focused festivals like All Points East or Lollapalooza can be high-value moments for brands, with digitally native audiences in a more concentrated moment,” says Parmar. And unlike Coachella, more niche or local events aren’t yet saturated with brand activity. “With the right activation, brands can create deeper engagement than a double tap on Instagram because here, attention is earned and not paid for.”
London-based luxury retailer LN-CC has eschewed mainstream festivals this year to partner with electronic music festival Love International in Tisno, Croatia, this July, which has a 5,000 capacity. LN-CC will be on the ground to cover the festival on social; it has created a guest-mix series to play in-store, featuring artists and DJs from the Love International line-up and will exclusively launch Love International Festival merch in the run-up in collaboration with brand and record label Almost Cut My Hair.
“Festivals are pretty democratic, and we like to think we’re the same. Whether it be showcasing something new to our younger audience or enforcing something with our older crowd, these projects deliver. Festivals that are truly for the music lovers are what’s compelling for us,” says LN-CC buying and creative director Reece Crisp. “We are not looking to cover or work with a festival that is a reference point for someone’s summer Instagram coverage.”
This is the first of many electronic music activations the retailer is planning, Crisp says, to align with the music-loving consumer. “We are continuing to push our brand values around music, so will be looking to collaborations with not just Love International but [independent music label] Toy Tonics, Boiler Room and more this summer.”
EYC is activating at Manchester day festival Hide Seek this summer, founded by one of its talents DJ Josh Baker in 2019. “The festival is obviously much smaller than Glastonbury, but it sold out of 12,000 tickets in an hour,” Delaney says. “We’re having conversations with mainstream brands about doing pop-ups there. For me, smaller festivals are really interesting for brands today, because the audience is super engaged.”
For these shorter festivals, pre and post-festival content is a crucial part of the journey at all festivals where brands want to show up. “The most impactful brands don’t just show up onsite — they activate before, during and after the event, weaving in everything from pre-festival content, like Revolve’s torrent of Coachella #OOTDs and #GRWMs to afterparties like Guess’s event,” Parmar says. “Festivals are powerful cultural touchpoints, but they exist in a fleeting, high-saturation window. To build real relevance and retention, brands need to show up consistently and contextually — not just once, but across multiple moments that reinforce their identity and value.”
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