Live Nation Entertainment, the global live events and entertainment company, is experiencing record growth as concert demand returns, with brand partnerships in tow.

The company, which also owns Ticketmaster, posted its strongest second quarter ever this year, with revenue up 27% to $5.6 billion, as fans emerged from the pandemic to pack stadiums to see their favorite artists perform again.

The demand is presenting unique opportunities for brands. Take, for example, how Taylor Swift’s massive Eras Tour helped Gillette Stadium reshape its social strategy.

At the forefront of driving brand opportunities through Live Nation’s events is Russell Wallach. Ad Age spoke with the global president of Live Nation Media and Sponsorship to discuss how the company is expanding brand partnerships globally, helping drive sign-ups to their loyalty programs and improving measurement in the space to prove ROI and capture more deals.

This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.

You’re seeing a record amount of brands investing in live shows; you have what 1,000-plus brand partners globally? What’s driving that demand?

Live music is the number one category globally that fans expect to spend more money on in the future, outpacing travel, shopping, movies and dining out. Brands are creating marketing campaigns that touch the fans before, during and after the event to maximize impact and create those memories.

Brands are understanding more than ever that music is one of the best ways to connect with their audiences. The music audience is more diverse, we’re targeting audiences from a global perspective, and the combination of diverse audiences with the opportunity for brands to create unbelievable experiences for fans is truly creating them lifelong fans.

[Related: Inside the NFL’s Taylor Swift era]

Can you tell me about your plans to expand brand partnerships globally?

We do over 200 festivals around the world. A great example is something like Lollapalooza; it’s not only in the U.S. but in Europe and India. We’re continuing to expand our global festival brand to new markets and we’re spending a lot of time focused on how we can amplify what brands are doing on-site at events.

We built out our own influencer network to work with influencers to amplify what brands are doing on-site and share experiences around the world. Working with partners like Snapchat and TikTok, we’re sharing these experiences with tens of thousands of people globally.

With digital tickets, Snap AR festival maps, social sharing and live festival streaming on Hulu, your events are reaching wider audiences. Tell me about these new audiences you’re able to reach and what that means for the types of brands you’re able to attract.

We now have festivals that are targeting very different audiences. As an example, we have festivals now that target Black audiences so we can talk to brands that want to reach Black audiences. There are very few other opportunities for brands to do that in an authentic way. Similarly, we have festivals that can target Hispanic audiences.

[Live Nation now has the following Black-founded and Hispanic festivals: Dreamville, Broccoli City, Strength of a Woman, Roots Picnic and Sueños.]

To build new festivals and experiences, we’re taking feedback from what we know fans are looking for and developing events that meet a need in the market.

We’re also seeing artists from all over the world; K-pop, Latin, Indian and African artists are now able to come to North America and sell out arenas here. There are not a lot of opportunities out there for brands to touch such diverse audiences.

Fifty-five percent of our live music attendees in the U.S. are women; we’re able to reach a harder-to-reach audience in live events; that’s led to a wider array of brands. Now you’re seeing beauty, fashion, different types of beverage brands, health and wellness, are coming into our ecosystem.

You said there are brands that have leaned into live music to supercharge their loyalty programs. Can you explain that more?

One of the biggest reasons we’re seeing brands get involved with us recently is to supercharge their loyalty programs.

For brands like Hilton, we helped develop [a program where] Hilton Honors members can use their points to buy concert tickets and VIP experiences. We helped get people into the Dunkin’ Rewards program [at its two-story activation, the Rhythm Room, which has led one in three of the 450 visitors of this activation that Live Nation surveyed to download the Dunkin’ app.]

We’re seeing [these partnerships] grow significantly as more and more brands look to grow their loyalty programs.

[Also read: How restaurants brands are driving loyalty programs]

Talk to me about how Live Nation is looking to improve measurement in the live events space and how that’s going to allow you to better compete for ad dollars.

We’re integrating sophisticated measurement across e-commerce, social media and high-touch experiential marketing within the industry. We have hired some of the best in the world on our insights and measurement team. We believe as the global leader in live events we need to be at the forefront of measurement.

There are three big areas: Performance effectiveness, which would be a brand’s return on investment; fan intelligence, return on experience; and traditional brand lift and KPIs, their return on investment. We track onsite engagement, benchmarking brand experience on-site. We’re doing post-festival surveys, brand lift surveys, online impression research, and we take all that and, based on what is important for the brand, we give them a detailed analysis.

We work with an in-house team and outside research to give a full view of whatever the brand is looking to achieve.

[More event news: Eventbrite hires Mojo Supermarket]