Billboards Are the Real Coachella Influencers

April 24, 2025

Along the edge of California’s Inland Empire, between the monumental San Jacinto Mountains and the massive Mojave Desert, there’s an unassuming stretch of Interstate 10, lined on either side with OUTFRONT billboards. You’d never know it most of the year, but these are some of the most important media placements this side of Super Bowl Sunday.

Why? One word: Coachella.

The Coachella Valley Arts & Music Festival arrives every April with a loud buzz, thanks to its star-studded lineups – this year’s led by Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day, and Post Malone – as well as its surprise guests, who this time around included Billie Eilish, Dave Grohl, and… Bernie Sanders?!

With nearly 150 artists performing on eight stages across two consecutive three-day weekends, it’s no wonder that the festival draws as many as 750,000 music fans each year (SOURCE: Goldenvoice). But it’s not just the size of the Coachella audience that makes it so important: it’s also their stroke.

Sure, the idea of influencers at Coachella is practically a meme at this point. And while professional content creators certainly have a presence, we’re not just talking about them – but also those who do it simply for the love of the game. The tastemakers, the trendsetters, the discovery-driven – the kind of people who come away from every music festival with a new favorite artist that they force all their friends to fall in love with too.

Coachella represents a juicy opportunity for brands to take advantage of proximity marketing, seizing the moment when a critical mass of like-minded souls descends upon a single location at a single time for a single reason. It’s a strategy we call Prime for a Time.

There’s a very good reason that advertisers watch this festival as closely as the fans tuned into the “Couchella” stream at home – this is their chance to impact culture at its source. Smart brands took full advantage of our traditional static and digital bulletins – and the world took notice, with lengthy features and listicles about Coachella billboards appearing in The New York Times, Ad Week, Vulture, and Stereogum.

Here are some of our favorite ways that brands leveraged our billboards at Coachella.

1. Treasure Hunt

This cryptic pink billboard from Atlantic Records beckoned to latitude and longitude coordinates. What did fans find at this location? A surprise performance from Ed Sheeran! (The ad copy is a lyric from his new album.)

“This strategy pays off because it trusts the audience to connect the dots. It leans into internet culture and builds anticipation organically. For marketers, the lesson is clear: Sometimes saying less invites more engagement. A cryptic ad with the right context can spark conversation faster than a paragraph of copy ever could.” – Lucy Markovitz, svp, gm, U.S. marketplace, Vistar Media

2. Contextual Copy

Fashion brand Nasty Gal – which has a whole Festival section on its website – rotated contextually relevant messages across our digital bulletins.

3. Lyrics for Lunch

Mr. Malone wasn’t the only Post who showed up big – Postmates delivered next-level contextual relevance, building its creative concepts around song lyrics from Coachella performers like Megan Thee Stallion and Green Day.

4. The Thirst Quencher

Attending a music festival is thirsty work – especially on weekend 1 this year, when the temperatures at the Empire Polo Grounds reached triple digits (SOURCE: The Desert Sun). That’s why it was claws out, paws up for White Claw on these digital screens, intended to influence purchase decisions at the bar.

5. Plain Old Promo

Who, when, where – sometimes that’s all you need. Rising J-Pop stars XG’s billboard kept it simple as can be.

 

 

 

 

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6. The Big Pun

It’s been said that puns are the lowest form of comedy – but hey, they still get laughs. That’s why TikTok-beloved hairbrush brand Tangle Teezer combined contextual relevance and light-hearted wordplay on our digitals.

7. The Anti-Brat

Another brat summer? Not if Charli XCX has anything to say about it! But what does it all mean? A second billboard may offer clues.

“This Coachella billboard moment has kind of turned into a tradition at this point…There’s something fun about the unpredictability of it — who’s going to pop up on your drive in, what does it mean, what are they teasing? It sets the tone.” – Jenn Tolman Hurst, SVP, MDDN

 

 

 

 

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8. The Trompe-l'Oeil

We love our XScape 3D digital creative – but artists have been creating the illusion of depth on 2D surfaces since the Renaissance. Here, electronic duo Polo & Pan use the technique to great effect to promote their new album.

9. The Sequential

Fashion boutique White Fox used another classic technique – the Burma-Shave – to tell the brand’s story across five consecutive billboards. It’s named after the shaving cream brand that pioneered the tactic in the 1920s.

10. The Savior

Finally, Interscope Records offered salvation – in the form of this message from Lady Gaga, who stepped off the Coachella mainstage and directly onto her Mayhem Ball arena tour without missing a beat.

“Gaga has something like four different Coachella billboards, none of which actually say her name. That’s fine. She’s the headliner. She doesn’t need it. The purpose here is to get Little Monsters all fired up when they’re on the road, and this should do the trick just fine.” – Tom Breihan, Stereogum

 

 

 

 

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That’s all for our Coachella billboard wrap-up. But for those billboards, the work continues: Stagecoach Festival draws 80,000 country music fans the very next weekend (SOURCE: KESQ).

Do you want to meet your audience in the desert next year? Contact OUTFRONT today!

Author: Jay Fenster, Marketing Manager @ OUTFRONT

Links to third-party content are not endorsed by OUTFRONT Media. Past performance may not be indicative of future results. OUTFRONT does not guarantee specific results or outcomes. SOURCES: The Harris Poll, Comscore