The Social Implications of Coachella, and the end of FOMO Marketing
As Weekend One winds down, something has become apparent -- you're not allowed to make people feel left out anymore. (Hear Hear!)
When I was a teenager, Coachella influenced everything - Fashion, Discourse, Stan Twitter, the charts, and even who was considered an enviable celebrity. This was back in the days when we had monoculture & chronological feeds. Instagram was new, and everything felt like gentrified Brooklyn, NY.
Because of this, those brands that were smart and had young people running their marketing team traded on the cultural value of the event to create organic marketing moments. This has now spiralled, as the event has gotten bigger, into ever larger displays of overconsumption to induce FOMO in the viewer, and get them to buy a "piece" of Coachella by buying the products of the brands.
This year, it's landing badly – in World One, a war is still being fought in the Gulf, and we're barrelling toward an oil crisis, all pun intended. The cost of living has gotten so bad, and the proliferation of AI data centers so profuse, that the Americans are starting to get a little French with it. In World 2, Donald Trump is the Second Coming of Christ. In World 3, your favourite influencer just made a video at the Starbucks Lounge.
This has led an entire group of content creators to actually downplay how much fun they're having, how many goodies they bagged, and how great their house is, in order to "rich right", or otherwise court the favour of their audience back from alienation.
This is new – FOMO was a very, very successful marketing tactic, and one I generally seek to avoid, because I know how destructive that impulse can be. This is the peer pressure impulse – the sense that you're being left out speaks to a core internal need in all of us as humans. Now, it seems anyone trying to use FOMO for marketing purposes will be called out by their audience – "It's elitist to make me feel like I'm missing out".
Meanwhile, Justin Bieber's headline set was Karaoke from his Laptop, and Sabrina's was a full Hollywood Stage Show. In some ways, both artists crossed meridians at Coachella – Bieber started his transition into a legacy act, and Sabrina officially became too big to get away with snarky jokes. One of the reasons I think her "disgust" at the Zagrouta landed so badly is that Sabrina is no longer the clueless underdog in the eyes of the audience – she is now a Top Tier star – so snark will read as "mean". Her entire "bit" relies on snark, which she will now have to adjust, rightly so, as she ascends.
My feelings about Coachella come in waves – for a long time, it was a goal for my professional music career to play the festival. I used to think the era I wanted to play in (2009-2015) was the best, but the non-headlining acts at Coachella this year looked fantastic. It's still a goal, but not a current one – it is still simply too dangerous, and soon perhaps too expensive, to travel into the USA. Maybe, like SNL, my dream will land in my backyard somehow – lord knows we have some great festivals here in the UK, and Glasto has always been the ultimate dream for me. I think Coachella still builds careers, which is more than can be said for most cultural institutions that corporatise the way Coachella has.
All in all, the shift away from FOMO marketing is a welcome one, and something I think we'll continue to see going forward. Capitalising on people's fear of missing out was always a ghoulish and mean-spirited way to engage.
