In this op-ed, Shooin chief handler Claudine Hall and RSPM executive producer Renee Schembri reflect on a weekend at Coachella spent watching brands compete for attention. They argued that most of them missed the point entirely.
We told ourselves it was research. Our feet are still not speaking to us.
After a weekend in the desert watching brands compete for attention alongside some of the most extraordinary music on earth, we came back depleted, dehydrated, and oddly inspired with a camera roll full of activations, and a lot of thoughts. Here are the ones that kept us awake on the flight home.
The influencer economy is due for a flip.
Scrolling through our feed during the festival felt like watching a very expensive casting call. Paid partnership. Paid partnership. Ad. Gifted. The disclosures are everywhere, and so, increasingly, is the fatigue.
Here’s a radical thought: what if we reversed the model entirely? What if influencers simply bought, used, and loved products, posted about them because they genuinely couldn’t help themselves, and then brands came knocking, paying to amplify content that was already real? Authenticity, but actually authentic. The content exists. The audience already trusts it. The brand just turns up the volume.
Australian creator Abbie Chatfield did something recently that sparked exactly this conversation. A brand paid her for one post. She loved the product so much she posted about it five more times unprompted. For the paid post she disclosed as you’d expect, but for the organic ones she landed on a caption that caught her audience off guard: “previous partner.” She put the question to her followers: how does that land? The response was telling. They liked it. It felt honest. It felt like the difference between being sold to and being told about something worth knowing.
It won’t work for every campaign. But somewhere in that inversion is a more honest economy and probably a more effective one.
Pinterest got the brief right.
Hands down one of the most charming executions of the weekend. They asked people to lock away their phones, take a photo booth picture, and mail it home by snail mail. In 2026. At Coachella.
People queued for it. Some missed major music moments because of it.
Because here’s what Pinterest understood that most brands didn’t: they weren’t asking people to engage more with a platform. They were encouraging them to engage with real life. Designing the exit, from the noise, the feed, the endless content loop — brought to life with real precision. The tension between a social media brand advocating for analogue living isn’t ironic. It’s the whole point. And in a sea of QR codes and UGC prompts, it stood out by asking almost nothing of you. More of this, please.
The gifting game needs a rethink.
Between Kourtney Kardashian’s Camp Poosh and Kendall Jenner’s 818 outpost plus everything in between – thousands of dollars of product, cascading across feeds, enjoyed by people who, bless them…already have everything.
I say this with no real malice: it’s starting to feel a bit… ick . Not because influencers shouldn’t be compensated, they absolutely should …but because the spectacle of it has lost the plot. When your activation reads as “entitled people getting free stuff,” the aspiration gap stops being inspiring and starts being alienating.
The brands doing it better are finding ways to bring the audience in, not watch from the outside. The velvet rope may work at the Met Gala. In music culture? Not so much anymore.
Heineken actually listened to the music.
One brand understood the assignment, and it was the beer company.
Heineken created an event within the event a world inside 125,000 people where somehow you felt like you’d scored your own exclusive party invite, regardless of what your ticket actually cost. Get in, stay in, don’t lose your place. FOMO done right: the kind that pulls you toward something rather than making you feel shut out.
Their music match tool — pairing you with artists based on your taste — was the cherry on top. Simple, joyful, and the only activation all weekend that actually remembered it was a music festival. That’s the brief every brand should be setting. So few of them did.
The overall feel of the weekend was genuinely conflicted: part supercharged content economy, part throwback to when festivals were just about the music. The brands that leaned into the latter? They won.
A few things we’d have loved to see and still might pitch:
- A “Waze” style navigation app around the grounds, with directions to the stages voiced by the artists performing that day. Someone make this happen.
- An UGG activation that found you at hour six, when your feet had completely given up, and just… helped. No content required. Just mercy, and possibly a little foot massage. Also, where’s the band-aid tent?
- Someone needs to solve the journey. Getting there and getting home right now is to put it diplomatically, a character-building experience. Where’s our dedicated Uber One lounge outside the grounds… air conditioned, cold towels, phone charging, a shot of Tequila… where you wait in comfort instead of meandering through the dusty fields on a one-way road to nowhere.
- And what about Waymo: a fleet of self-driving vehicles shuttling people between Palm Springs and the site would be genuinely futuristic, helpful and wildly on brand for a festival that loves a talking point.
The opportunity is still wide open. Coachella is one of the most culturally loaded environments on the planet. Most brands are still treating it like a billboard or a transaction.
The bottom line?
Authenticity isn’t dead. But the performance of authenticity is getting very tired, very fast. The brands and creators who figure out how to close that gap, who make people feel something real, even in a sponsored context, are the ones who’ll matter.
Inside the festival, amplification is flooded and fiercely competitive. The stand-out moments aren’t happening in the masses, they’re happening around the experience, in the spaces between. Because here’s the thing about any great event: it’s not just the main stage that defines it. It’s how it starts and how it ends. The arrival, the exit, the unexpected moment that nobody planned for but everyone remembers.
That’s where the white space is. That’s where the next great brand activation is waiting to be built.
Less gifting. More genuine engagement. And above all, it’s about the music.
Shooin is a plug-in marketing business. We work across trade marketing, PR activations, events and campaigns… for brands that want strategy and execution without the overhead… projects handled yesterday.
RSPM is one of Australia’s leading full-service event production and management agencies specialising in experiential marketing, large-scale brand activations, and high-profile corporate events.
