Even if you aren’t going to The Untz Festival, you’ve probably seen one of their viral videos surfacing through social media. From Shia Labeouf parodies to festival medicine advertisements, the unique spin on modern humor truly took hold of the audience.
We wanted to give you readers an inside look on who’s the genius behind the screen doing the music festival marketing for this year’s Untz Festival.
Here’s all you need to know about the Chief Content Officer for The Untz Festival. Otherwise known as Anand Harsh:
How did you get started with The Untz Festival?
I stumbled upon a call for journalism interns while I was getting a master’s degree at Indiana University. I was at the same Phish and String Cheese shows as Avi over the past decade, and even though I told him I didn’t know anything about electronic music, he confidently said “You’ll figure it out.” After two weeks, I changed “Intern” in my email signature to “Editor in Chief,” and people started answering my emails, and the rest is history. That was 7 years ago, and I think we’ve made our mark in the underground electronic music scene.
What’s your background like in music festival marketing?
I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I think that’s why everything we do is so different and so wrong. Like I said, my background is in journalism—I don’t know the first thing about public relations or promoting shows. Thankfully, with a lineup like ours, we didn’t have to do much work. People were excited about this lineup from the jump, and so all I had to do was create promo that reflects a) how genuinely pumped we are about the artists we got to agree to play our crazy festival, and b) how genuinely stupid I am.
How do your ideas come about for the hilarious videos you make? If there was an award for best music festival marketing of the year, you’d definitely win.
Part of it is laziness. Like “Oh shit, I need to put out a video today—what can I do in 3 hours that won’t test my 5th grade equivalent video editing skills. Hmmm… where are the cats?” Because I don’t overthink them, the videos are generally just dumb enough to make me laugh, and I really think that’s my litmus test. I realize most of them are corny, and I’m super leaning on the fact that Bhindi is the most adorable cat on the planet (as bad of a girl as she is), so that’s pretty much cheating. But whatever, these mega-festivals with ad budgets twice the size of our entire talent budget should have thought of this first. Dumb cat videos are like 90% of the internet. Get with the program. Part of it is insomnia, too. I will shoot up at 3am with a strange idea, and then obsess over it until 5am, realize I’m not going to be able to fall asleep, and then going to my office to tinker. So if anything seems completely insane, you’re basically watching the mid-morning musings of a madman, so don’t take it so seriously. Avi really gave me free rein—”Do whatever you want,” he said, so I rolled with it. Glad it worked out.
What are you looking forward to most about The Untz Festival this year?
I’m looking forward to sitting at the back of the crowd with my beautiful wife—who has put up with long nights, editing weird cat videos in the basement instead of doing anything productive around the house, and aggravating calls and mistakes and setbacks that make me throw my phone into the neighbor’s yard—and breathing a collective sigh of relief that’s it’s all running smoothly and everyone is having a good time. And then start overanalyzing everything and try to figure out how to do it all better next year.
The next time you have to take a stab at music festival marketing think CATS!
All you need to remember is Cats and you’ll have it in the bag in no time. The Untz Festival truly is something special. We also got a chance to reach out to the Executive Producer of The Untz Festival to get a better idea as to what makes it so atypical.
Here is what Avi Gallant had to say about that:
This is not your typical ‘EDM festival.’ This is an intimate family and friends gathering of rabid underground bass junkies. These are the artists we love who don’t get mainstream attention—which we prefer. We have a platform from which we can share our tastes of eclectic, off-kilter, and left-field bass music, and the festival is the natural extension of that. This is going to be a special weekend. Come discover your favorite new artist.
Grab your tickets to The Untz Festival this weekend at the Mariposa Fairgrounds in California by clicking here!
Check out The Untz Festival lineup below:
Enjoy our playlist for The Untz as you take your journey to Mariposa.
Follow The Untz Festival:
