BeReal heads to Coachella with a plan to depict “RealEvents”

At Coachella, social app BeReal is debuting a new feature. The 2022 breakout hit has announced RealEvents, which will collect content from oft-visited locations to create themed galleries.

BeReal announced RealEvents in a post on its official blog. According to the post, users will be able to join events and post up to six BeReals that relate to that gathering. You don’t have to attend Coachella to join the first RealEvents group. Instead, BeReal is accepting both in-person and remote submissions, which will be presented in a “custom timeline” that all attendees will be able to access. BeReal also plans to create video montages to sum up its RealEvents submissions.

At Coachella, BeReal will inaugurate RealEvent with help from artists like Tinashe. “We couldn’t be more thrilled to be launching this at Coachella,” reads the blog post. “There are so many amazing artists participating, and we’re looking forward to sharing this experience with all of them and all of you! We’re going to have lots of featured events coming through the spring and summer of 2024 and…maybe we’ll even let you create your own.”

Since its rise to prominence two years ago, BeReal has considered several strategies that would allow users to monetize their time-sensitive, unfiltered posts. That effort has led to the launch of several in-house products that facilitate sponsored content. BeReal is already onboarding celebrities and prominent companies as RealPeople and RealBrands, respectively. With RealEvents, it’s adding another mechanism that could easily become part of a branded initiative or ad campaign.

RealEvents is also BeReal’s answer to the geolocated tags that have come to define event-focused coverage on apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Launching the new feature at Coachella is a smart idea, since the festival has a long history of online video partnerships. YouTube has long served as the broadcast partner for the Southern California spectacle, and it has even used the event as a platform to showcase its creator community.