Glastonbury and branding: a roundup from our spies in the field…Orange, Carlsberg and Red Bull

So, this weekend, some of the Brand Strategy team visited the fabulous Glastonbury festival. After writing about whether brands at music festivals really add that much to the experience last month (subscribers can read that here), we thought it might be worth doing a little roundup of the activity at the Somerset site this year.

We swung by the Carlsberg area on Thursday evening. We didn’t see a whole lot of Carlsberg while we were at the festival; the cans turned up in many hands as it is the ‘official beer’ of Glastonbury but it seemed otherwise fairly unobtrusive to us. We’re not sure if this was a deliberate policy not to step on happy hippy toes or a consequence of the festival’s good-natured rules, which don’t stop attendees bringing their own booze along. Some news reports before the event indicated that the drinks brand would be supplying people with hands-free festival drinking backpacks, but none of these were spotted by Brand Strategy spies on the ground.

By contrast, mobile phone operator Orange was omnipresent. The brand’s Chill & Charge tent frequently saw massive queues. And there seemed to be plenty of people hanging out there for long periods even without their phones, with music and a large video screen playing tracks to festival-goers checking their emails and charging up their handsets. The only negative points about the place were that if you had a popular phone, it was almost impossible to ever get near the chargers you needed and that sometimes the music was more “club-on-a-Saturday-night” than “chill”. Otherwise, this seemed to be a good execution of a good brand sponsorship. Although we never saw that kinetic charger powered by dancing.

Our favourite brand sponsorship, however, was one that we didn’t even realise was a branded spot for most of the weekend. Red Bull had a little stage with a bar, some western-type theme going on and only their bull logo in a subtle way on the front gave it away to passers-by that this was a sponsored area rather than an independent stage. There appeared to be some strange folks doing some 1930s American style bopping around and some groovy little bands getting people doing retro moves for much of the weekend. We asked around and lots of people appeared to have had a good long dance there before they picked up on the sponsorship. When they did, the universal view was that it was a fun place. So good work, Red Bull.

Any other Glastonbury-goers have any brand tales? Good or bad? Let us know!