Rosemarlines Effiong
Nov 2 · 3 min read

The Winner Takes It All: FuckJerry And The Fyre Festival Debacle

Photo Credit: Fyre Festival

Having lived through the drama of the Fyre Festival either as a defrauded victim or a bemused spectator who followed the heavy press and social media backlash, one thing that we can all agree on is that Fyre Festival was an all-out fraud from the word go. With two major documentaries, and tons of articles written on the subject, I have come to believe that amongst the major elements that resulted in the overwhelming debacle, one thing the organizers failed to consider from the start, was the simple art of project management, and to their credit, they got their marketing right -perfect in fact, all thanks to the controversial marketing agency — FuckJerry of Jerry Media, who was contracted by Billy MacFarland to market the event.

There’s still an ongoing debate centred on the role of the marketing agency in the selling of the fraud festival to people in the manner they did, and how they are accomplices to the crime, not particularly exonerated by their smart move to make a tell-it-all documentary about the fraud that was the festival, from the exact footages that were made to promote the event.

While the ethics and moral compass, or lack thereof of both organizers and the promoters of the Fyre Festival have been and are still being questioned by people around the world, I can’t help but marvel at the brilliance of the strategy that was put in place by the FuckJerry crew, and the flawless execution which resulted in the event is completely sold out in just a few hours. As a marketer myself, I understand how incredibly difficult it can be, to come up with the right online marketing strategy that converts, given as little direction as with the chaos that happened behind the scenes of the festival, and with no time to experiment with other strategies.

A little background search on FuckJerry tells the story of a Tumblr blog which moved to Instagram and piggybacking off contents generated by people across the internet and the sensational meme culture, has grown in a multi-million dollar media and advertising agency. Even more impressive was their ability to use their data and insights to sell an aspirational but non-existent product to upper-class Millenials — the generation of humans most willing to feed on aspirations for the Fear Of Missing Out. Their ability to make any sense from the party of chaos thrown by the organizers, to create stunning visuals promoting this new culture of fun that was about to disrupt the world of the music festival was professionalism at top-notch, as shown in the Netflix documentary. This they delivered by activating a network of social media influencers who flooded the internet, brandishing a secret weapon — the strategically chosen plain orange bricks along with cheesy captions that caught their targeted audience dead in their tracks and got them asking each other “what’s up?”.

Photo Credit: Laughing Place

These and other major strategies effectively sold out the event to thousands of party-goers who wanted in on this fantasy of a once in a lifetime experience. And when the fraud bubble burst, the agency was quick to sight a spot to sell their side of the story to Netflix, a move widely assumed to be an attempt at shifting blames — a narrative debunked by the rival Hulu documentary, but for their efforts, FuckJerry walked away with a lot of money, as well as an EMMY nomination. Those, in my opinion, are major wins from a company best known for curating Instagram memes. At least, it is good to know that somebody go their job right, and while the organizers failed sorely at the only job that they had — to deliver the greatest party ever known to man, FuckJerry delivered on theirs.

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