How Coachella Makes an Exclusive Brand More Accessible

How do you make an exclusive brand a bit more accessible without damaging your mystique? Luxury brands wrestle with this issue all the time especially as they court younger audiences who are on the cusp of being affluent. Right now in Indio, California, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival offers an approach by using digital to open up an elite experience to a broader audience.

Coachella is the top music festival in the world according to Billboard, grossing $67.2 million and attracting 180,000 people in 2013 over the course of two weekends. Coachella is also an exclusionary event for the affluent, with an expensive admission fee and amenities that include a furnished "Shikar style tent" with electrical outlets and two queen-sized beds at a cost of $6,500. Since April 11, I've been fully immersed in Coachella. I've been introduced to musicians such as Haim and ASAP Ferg, re-kindled my love affair with the music of the Cult, enjoyed the long-awaited OutKast reunion, and photographed several moments onstage, all published here and via the SlideShare associated with this post.

Oh, and I've not even left my home in the Midwest hinterlands.

The chances are slim-to-none that I'll attend Coachella anytime soon -- not when general admission tickets cost $375, plus the cost of travel and "wretchedly expensive" lodging. On the surface, Coachella may look anything but exclusionary, especially when you consider that being there involves swimming a sea of dirty, writhing bodies baking in the hot desert sun. But it's every bit a luxury I cannot afford. As Todd Martens and Mikal Wood noted recently in the Los Angeles Times, "Coachella is now more like a spring break weekend at a walled-off resort than an edgy music festival."

Like Louis Vuitton, Coachella has aggressively employed digital to make its brand more accessible to wannabes like me who stand on the outside looking in with our noses pressed against the glass. At the heart of the digital experience is a high-quality livestream available on YouTube. From the comfort of your own home or while heading out for groceries you can literally take Coachella with you (as I did Friday night watching ASAP Ferg on my iPhone). Ironically the livestream gives viewers an advantage that in-person attendees lack, which is the ability to enjoy the performers up close and personal thanks to some excellent camera work.

There is also an app that gives you the illusion of sort of being there. For instance, the app shares the same notifications that festival goers get. The difference is that as they're sweating it out in the desert taking selfies and watching California sunsets, you're going about with your mundane life in suburban Chicago. Conceivably you can read customer reviews of the 118 Degrees Vegan dining spot (located at the "VIP White Tents") while waiting for your cheeseburger at McDonald's. (The app notified me of a schedule change for OutKast while I was dropping off some books at my local library.) The app smartly integrates with your own social spaces, where you can share impressions of Coachella.

Coachella extends its brand all year-round through many other digital platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, but the livestream is the most crucial element. Not only can you listen to music, but also by taking screen shots on your own device, you can create visual stories and share them easily on all your social spaces. I uploaded on to Twitter a photo of ZZ Hill that I snapped on my iPhone while watching her perform on the livestream, and hours later ZZ Hill herself favorite the photo -- a passing, unspoken connection between artist and fan that occurred hundreds of miles apart.

The livestream creates a highly participatory viewing experience akin to the social TV phenomenon that marketers are still trying to figure out. I can't be at Coachella, but I can share the festival easily from my own living room by quickly taking high-resolution screen shots and sharing them across the digital world, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and anywhere else I can quickly reach with my iPhone. I am not just a viewer but also a content hustler. And the social nature of digital is precisely why an unattainable brand like Coachella opens its doors to someone like me: tweeters, Instagrammers, and Facebookers go to work for Coachella as brand ambassadors from afar. In return, we get to see the same artists that the festivalgoers see.

So far the digital Coachella, which has been available for a few years, does not appear to be cannibalizing ticket sales. You can't enjoy any of the special events (such as the parties and people watching) that come with being there, and of course you can't say you were there, either. (It's debatable how many in-person attendees are there for the music first and foremost, anyway.) Everyone seems to be getting what they want from Coachella even if not everyone can be there.

Sharing an exclusive event through digital is a more common experience. The Grammys offer backstage access during awards night through digital as does the Academy Awards (although the 2014 ceremony was marred by technical glitches).

What these events have in common is offering fans a chance to share the experience especially through visual storytelling -- and, in the case of the Grammys and Oscars, go behind the scenes to see the stars in more private moments, thus whetting the appetite of our celebrity-obsessed culture in the United States.

I'm surprised that Coachella and its sponsors have not yet figured out a way to systematically co-brand with the more aggressive online fans given how willingly we create content in real time. For a savvy brand there are boundless opportunities to sponsor audience members who are hustling content all night. Monetizing envy from afar is the next opportunity for exclusionary brands like Coachella.