The Hype at Coachella This Year? Billboards.

New York Times

17-04-2025

By most accounts, the 130-mile drive from Los Angeles to the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival last week was hot, congested and generally unpleasant.
But there has been at least one bright spot for the 200,000 or so dehydrated, impatient and aggrieved fans who make the trek for one or both of the three-day events each year: clever billboards.
Artists have advertised their sets on the giant placards that dot the route into Indio, Calif., for years. But the 2025 event reached critical mass, in terms of quantity and creativity.
'This year was an absolute explosion,' said Morgan Rose, a director of client partnerships at Wilkins Media, who has been doling out highly coveted space on the boards since last fall. 'Eleven months out of the year they are completely worthless,' he added.
But not this one.
Those who bother to look out the windows while slogging down the 10 East may see a billboard for Charli XCX that features her signature shade of green and wonder, 'Why did she cross out 'Brat?'' Or one for Tyla, who is all wet, asking 'Got water?' Or one informing all comers in all-caps, 'It's Pronounced Djo.'
'Not particularly helpful,' Djo's manager, Nick Stern, conceded. (The artist in question is the actor Joe Keery, who put out his third album this month.) 'But it does lead people to ask and go look.'
There are at least a dozen more. They have been chronicled, compared and ranked on the internet. The idea is to build excitement and anticipation among festivalgoers, much to like the barrage of billboards that hype up drivers speeding from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
'This Coachella billboard moment has kind of turned into a tradition at this point,' Jenn Tolman Hurst, a member of Ava Max's management team, said over email. '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.'
And billboards are, for the most part, very intentional. Consider the title of one of Tyla's most popular songs: 'Water.'
The only issue, said Tina Ibañez, a creative director at Epic Records, was that the team had to explain the 'Got milk?' advertising campaign to Tyla, a 20-someting who did not grow up in the United States. Zeke Lewis, the company's president, made a hard sell as the deadline to submit a design approached, then Ibañez made sure the font and the kerning matched the 1990s dairy campaign as closely as possible.
The billboard for Ava Max counterintuitively instructs people, 'Don't Click Play on Ava Max.' Those who do click around to dontclickplayonavamax.com will find a petition, which is actually is a link to preview an unreleased song.
'People definitely clicked,' Tolman Hurst said.
Post Malone's board features layered, torn visuals that tease his merchandise tent, said Grant Kratzer, the lead creative for Posty Co.
'The narrative came full circle during his Sunday night headlining set, where he performed in a life-size replica of the billboard,' Kratzer said over email.
Deciding what goes on a billboard, however, may be less challenging than procuring one.
Stern said his team booked one for Djo months in advance: 'The second we confirmed our Coachella offer, we started talking about the board.'
The cost is higher than the normal rate, Rose said. The vendors he works with must convince long-term advertisers to give up their inventory for this month. But the price 'is not unreasonable,' Stern said. 'We're independent artists. We don't have stupid money for our billboards.'
Increasing demand with relatively low inventory has sometimes caused chaos for Rose. As have high winds, late-arriving art and exceedingly high expectations.
Sometimes an artist may want more than one board. (Lady Gaga, for instance, has several this year.) But what happens if someone wants four in a row to create a multipart message, but an accident attorney holds one of the boards in the middle?
Rose has been in the business of solving that and unrelated problems for about a decade, but he and others agree that interest in Coachella billboards spiked coming out of the pandemic. There are around 30 billboards people want, and many more customers than placements. He booked 13 this year, two that are positioned on the drive home.
The best real estate — boards that are perhaps 20 miles from the festival — often get scooped up first, Rose said. But many people are almost as happy with ones that may not get spotted by many drivers at all: They simply get seen on social media.
These days, Stern considers billboard marketing 'untraditional.' In a world filled with endless scrolling and digital ads, grabbing a real thing that 'people actually see' can be an added bonus, he said.
People will take pictures and post them too, he said, 'and you get both.'