Rolling Loud’s Special Touches, Cool Activations And Hundred-Dolla Bills

– Tariq Cherif and Matthew ZIngler
Rolling Loud’s founders

Rolling Loud co-founders Tariq Cherif and Matt Zingler have a heavy hand in the brand they’ve brought up from nothing ,and the personal touches are felt with everything from official signage and merch to the poop emojis in the bathroom.

See Rolling Loud: Not Just A Festival

The duo explains:

Cherif: Hip-hop is a multidimensional genre, or culture, really, I should say. It’s not only about the music, it’s about fashion, art, swag, it’s about how you carry yourself. So there’s ways we can expose and highlight that at the show. We do that via cool sponsorship activations with the right brands that speak to the culture. Like when True Religion does a basketball court.

Or Monster Energy comes in and does a skatepark. We collab with amazing fashion designers to make really cool merch you can be proud to wear in any setting, not specific for just the concert experience.

Everything is authentic and on-brand and true. We won’t let it happen if not. One time we had some branded inflatable that was just their logo, and I was like ‘Nah,’ can’t ever do that again. It’s gotta be cool.

Zingler: We also limit that a lot. We’re not very heavy on the sponsors because we’d rather not have a sponsorship than have a lame activation. The bigger the site the more we can do. If it was up to Tariq and myself, we’d have a full basketball court or skatepark and make it like Disneyworld.

Cherif: Even the little things, like our signage. We use poop emojis in the bathrooms, because it’s funny (laughs.) Little things like that, as a silly example. The ticket says ‘congrats, you’ve secured the bag.’

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Mood <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/RollingLoudV?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#RollingLoudV</a> <a href=”https://t.co/GmucjXYG4K”>pic.twitter.com/GmucjXYG4K</a></p>— Rolling Loud (@RollingLoud) <a href=”https://twitter.com/RollingLoud/status/1114312951303946240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>April 5, 2019</a></blockquote>

Zingler: The wristband, the texture of how it feels, the design, the color palettes, the lighting, everything down to the fireworks shows to the lighting we use, the pyros and cryos, anything you see, the confetti, any unique artist experiential stage presence, we go above and beyond to provide that.

Cherif: We bring in a Brink’s truck, and it’s full of gold bricks and 100-dollar bills with Matt’s face and my face on it.

Zingler: Yeah! We do cool shit! (both laughing).