Meredith Cranmer, founder and managing director, Curious Nation
This year’s Coachella served as a global stage for something of a cultural paradox, offering critical insights for marketers and those seeking to create powerful brand experiences. We witnessed two vastly different approaches to ‘being there’.
On the one hand, the hollow spectacle of the queen of pop performing to a forest of smartphones held aloft by a seemingly uninterested crowd; on the other, a tech giant that forced its audience to look away from the screen entirely.
Weekend two of the annual music and arts festival held in the Coachella Valley in the Colorado Desert saw a surprise appearance from Madonna performing two of her biggest hits, Vogue and Like a Virgin, alongside Sabrina Carpenter.
What should have been a moment of pure, unadulterated joy as the Material Girl made her return to the Coachella stage 20 years on was anything but. The real story wasn’t Madonna’s surprise entrance, her duet with the 26-year-old Espresso star, the choreography, or even her overall performance. It was the crowd.
Social media lit up, slamming the crowd’s lacklustre reactions. Thousands of fans, the majority with phones raised, bodies still, little dancing or singing, just filming, drew commentators to label them as ‘dystopian’, ‘zombies’ and ‘stunned mullets’. And it is hard to disagree.
As Vicky Beercock, a leader in brand partnerships, noted, festivals sold premium tickets on the promise of being there. But being there increasingly means performing presence for an algorithm rather than actually having it. When the audience is the content crew, the room loses the energy that made the moment worth capturing in the first place. She adds, “And that’s an economic problem, not just a vibe one. If premium ticket prices are justified by irreplaceable, felt experience – and that experience is being quietly hollowed out by the same content machine festivals depend on – the value proposition starts to crack.”
The Pinterest pivot
Contrast the Vogue vacuum with Pinterest’s activation at the same festival. It’s the third year at Coachella, this year saw Pinterest asking festivalgoers to do the unthinkable and lock their phones in pouches before entering
their space.
Inside, people were making custom charms, writing postcards to mail home, and getting makeup touch-ups. They were actually doing things. This wasn’t just a gimmick but is rooted in specific consumer data. Gen Z searches on Pinterest for ‘analogue aesthetic’ rose 260 per cent between early 2025 and 2026, while searches for ‘dumb phones’ jumped 150 per cent.
While comparing a festival crowd’s reaction to a musical performance and a curated brand experience is not necessarily comparing apples with apples, the broader implications remain. By removing the pressure to perform for an algorithm, Pinterest created something increasingly rare: genuine presence.
They aligned their brand promise of being the ‘anti-scroll’ platform with a physical reality. It served as brand storytelling without requiring a single Instagram post from attendees to convey the message.
The cost of the ‘shared’ moment
If we design an activation purely for shareability, it often makes for a poor experience for the person actually standing there. When the energy in the room dies, the content suffers anyway.
This has big implications for Australian marketers. Brand activations are among the few remaining ways to build deep connections with consumers, and studies show that the experience economy can deliver a return on investment of up to 4 dollars for every 1 dollar spent. This high ROI exists because these moments build deep emotional memory and drive long-term brand advocacy that a fifteen-second video clip simply cannot replicate.
However, that ROI depends entirely on the quality of the interaction. If the consumer is too busy checking their framing to actually feel the product or the moment, the connection remains superficial. You might get the reach, but you lose the resonance.
Of course, I would never suggest we abandon the secondary audience when it comes to developing experiential experiences. We are an industry built on reach and scale, and social engagement, when done right, will remain an important element for brand activations. But we need to find a better balance and cannot afford to treat the live audience as a mere backdrop for the digital one.
The competitive edge in experiential marketing is not a better ring light, but having the conditions to create genuine human responses. We should start by designing the room first. If the vibe is electric, the content will follow organically and feel far more authentic to those watching at home.
The phone is not the enemy, but if we continue to optimise for the screen at the expense of the soul, we are just making very expensive and very quiet commercials.