What Coachella's Snapchat Partnership Can Teach Brands About Customer Experience

Concert streaming and sharing

Brands have long tapped into popular music trends, but this summer offers something different: opportunities to integrate with live music events through new video streaming and storytelling platforms. This is no niche audience, either. About 32 million people attend at least one music festival in the U.S. each year, according to Nielsen, and nearly half of them are millennials—many of whom share their concert experiences via social media.

This year’s Coachella, the annual arts and music fest that springs from the Southern California desert each April, drew about 100,000 people per day during the six-day event. Yet a whopping 40 million more worldwide attended the festival remotely via the event’s Snapchat Live Story, which merged bits of user content into a short video chronicling the festival. AEG Live, the producer behind Coachella and other major music festivals, has a multi-year partnership with Snapchat for Live Story coverage of select events.

The good news for brands is that Snapchat just overhauled its advertising API to make it easier to reach the app’s 150 million daily users with video ads. For marketers looking to court millennial consumers through more impactful customer experiences, the programmatic capabilities of Snapchat’s new advertising platform are especially attractive in the context of summer music festivals.

“Different marketers have different objectives, and we just want to make it easier for them to buy ads on the platform,” Imran Khan, chief strategy officer at Snapchat, told Adweek. “We want [brands] to have a place where they can tell their stories, you know, in a better way.”

Snapchat isn’t the only platform that is leveraging new partnerships and tech to capture the allure of live music events. Facebook recently launched a new Continuous Video Live API, replacing the previous 90-minute limit on its Facebook Live streams with nonstop broadcasting capability—just in time for summer festival season.

“We’re looking forward to seeing what Live API developers come up with in the future,” Fidji Simo, head of video for Facebook, told TechCrunch. “We expect developers and publishers to get creative with this new capability”—creativity that will undoubtedly lead to new opportunities for brand partnerships and targeted media.

It’s already starting to happen: At the CMA Music Festival in Nashville in early June, a Facebook Live Lounge gave fans worldwide a glimpse at Q&A sessions with country music artists including Sara Evans and Jamie Lynn Spears. And the nation’s largest dance music festival, Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, plans to stream each night of the festival on Facebook Live, as well as on YouTube.

Of course, YouTube knows a thing or two about live music already. Also at this year’s Coachella, YouTube debuted 360-degree live streaming and spatial audio, which simulates the quality of sound listeners would hear in person. With these new features, remote viewers can experience the concert almost as if they were there.

Music is all about creating a shared experience—whether by posting a concert video to social media or simply singing along to a favorite song with a friend. For marketers, marrying that musical energy with customer experience can pay big dividends.

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