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This article aims to explore the digitization of festival engagement due to the emergence of social media and the associated consequences this development brings for festivals and place brands. This is done by drawing on a study of eight festivals that took place in Sweden during the summer of 2015. In total, a material of 77,034 user-generated contents published in social media were collected and analyzed. The presented results illustrate that the studied festivals enjoy considerable levels of digital engagement and that this also generates engagement for the associated places in which the festivals take place. In view of these findings, this article presents the concepts of digital festival engagement and digital place-brand engagement to explain the interplay that takes place between festivals and place brands in social media. By doing so, this article contributes to extant literature within the field of event management by depicting how the digitization of festival engagement adds increased complexity as engagement manifests both physically and digitally, which in turn gives rise to several conceptual and managerial challenges in regards to the management of consumer engagement.
