Factory 360 & PayPal Featured In ADWEEK for Govenor's Ball

PayPal Wants to Make Your Governor’s Ball Experience Easier; E-wallet services and deals makes going to a festival a lot simpler

Headed to Governor’s Ball Music Festival in New York? PayPal wants you to leave your wallet at home.

The online payment processing company—which is working with experiential marketing agency Factory 360—will not only be partnering with select vendors at the outdoor festival, but will offer special deals for those who decide to use the digital service to pay for goods. PayPal will also be bringing in additional WiFi to make sure its products can actually work in the crowded space, and it will provide free lockers.

“We found that consumers don’t want to carry their wallet. They use their phone more anyway,” said Zach Ashley, Factory 360’s chief marketing officer.

This isn’t the first time that PayPal has tried to make festivalgoers’ lives easier. It’s brought the same utilities to the Austin City Limits festival in Austin, Texas, and Outside Lands in San Francisco. Factory 360 worked with them to create organic opportunities that can help consumers, which in terms of PayPal branding, hopefully logs the positive experience in their minds.

“The nature of sponsorships has fundamentally changed,” said Anuj Nayer, PayPal’s senior director of global initiatives. “People want to experience it themselves. They don’t want to be shown or told. They want to experience it themselves and make their own decisions.”

And PayPal isn’t the only one marketing at the Governor’s Ball. AT&T is bringing in extra towers so people can actually connect with their friends, an issue that has hampered many big events in the past. And, Snapchat is partnering with Insomniac, the creators of Electric Daisy Carnival, to provide free WiFi for attendees.

Of course, without WiFi, festivalgoers would be unable to post their experiences on social media. And as millennials know, if you don’t Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Vine or Tweet it, well, then it never happened.

“There’s nothing worse than taking a photo and not being able to share that moment,” Nayer said.

OMG.