Beyond the Dark Side of Influencer Marketing
Brand takeaways from the two Fyre Festival documentaries
Fyre Festival was the laughing stock of the entire internet for a few days at the end of April 2017. When the supposedly extra-exclusive, luxury music festival turned out to be a Hunger Games-esque camping exercise for rich millennials and social influencers, the implosion was documented in real time on social media, creating a perfect spectacle for all to share and consume with a gleeful mixture of disbelief and schadenfreude. The epic failure spun many memes and thus reached more people than it ever could have expected. Then the 2017 Met Gala rolled around, and the Internet quickly moved on.
Now, almost two years later, the Fyre fiasco has once again entered the pop culture consciousness, thanks to two documentary feature films that were released the same week. Hulu released Fyre Fraud on January 14, 2019 while Netflix released Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened four days later on January 18. Naturally, think-pieces on what this event reveal about millennials and the state of music industry started popping up again, just as they did in April 2017. And for good reason, because the Fyre Festival, from its inception to its downfall, perfectly captured the new rules and risks of a 21st-century attention economy, driven by a powerful mix of tech-utopianism and FOMO. As brand marketers, there are some interesting insights to glean from re-examining this event.
New Rules of The Attention Economy
There is no debate that, as far as the marketing campaign was concerned, Fyre Festival was a resounding success. The first-time festival, envisioned by serial entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, smartly tapped into a social zeitgeist and leveraged an Instagram blitz campaign orchestrated by Jerry Media to sell out 95% of its pricey tickets within 24 hours, per Netflix’s Fyre. This Instagram campaign was so exceedingly effective mainly for two reasons: the power of influencer culture and a great understanding of Millennial cultural zeitgeist.
First of all, choosing Instagram as the primary channel for their launch campaign almost guaranteed success. Out of all the social media platforms, Instagram is the one that most influencers flock to. According to a January 2018 Zine report, 78% of social influencers worldwide are using Instagram as their primary social platform for brand collaborations. Most marketers are keenly aware of the power of influencer marketing by now, as 75% of national advertisers in the US make use of influencer marketing and influencer marketing spend on Instagram in 2019 is forecast to reach 2.38 billion dollars.
The Jerry Media team ran a ‘scroll-breaking” social campaign by getting a number of top-tier social influencers to post an orange square tile around the same time, which flooded the feed of many Instagram users, stopped them right in their tracks with a striking visual, and directed them to the sleekly produced promo video featuring top supermodels partying on beautiful Bahamian beaches and grand promises of an ultra-luxury, exclusive music experience of a lifetime. Tickets were immediately available for purchase via the website. At a time when making online purchases at the recommendation of influencers has become a completely normalized behavior for many social media users — with around 40% of them making a purchase after seeing it used by an influencer — it is no wonder that those tickets quickly sold out.
In addition, the creative minds of this campaign also shrewdly took advantages of the worst instincts of the archetypal millennial consumers. As Hulu’s Fyre Fraud paints it, the way that Fyre Festival was marketed ticked off every box for a smartphone-addicted, FOMO-driven, and experience-seeking millennial consumer with some disposable income. Much as one could argue against this stereotypical idea of what millennials want, the fact that Fyre festival went on to sell out to an estimated 5,000 people, many of whom did belong to this demographic, reveals certain aspects of millennial culture.
Social media has upended the traditional top-down paradigm of culture across many categories, from music to fashion to sports. Thanks to the ongoing shift of consumer attention from mass media to digital channels, the cultural gatekeepers that used to dictate trends and taste have ceded their power considerably to a more democratized, decentralized network of social influencers. In other words, the source of influence has shifted with consumer attention, which evolved in tandem with people’s choice of media channels. As a result, many celebrities, who used to rely on mass media to establish and promote their fame, have now also become social influencers to directly engage with fans and stay relevant in the digital age.
Culture is also spreading at a much faster velocity as it adapts to the speed of the internet. No more waiting a week or two after seeing a movie trailer before you can watch it in theaters. In the world of influencer economy, content is always available for consumption right now, and purchase is usually just a few clicks away with the allure of special discounts codes that are usually present. These factors create a hotbed for impulsive decisions, further compounded by peer sharing and potential virality built into many social networks.
The Dark Side of the Influencer Economy
The double-edged power of social influencers is what launched the Fyre Festival, and also ultimately led to its downfall. In Hulu’s Fyre Fraud, which interviewed the mastermind behind the fiasco, Billy McFarland, the now convicted fraudster made a self-aggrandizing yet factually correct statement that “so many things had to go right to make it this big of a failure.” The fact that Fyre Festival became a total fiasco is predicated on the success of that influencer campaign. Had any of the social influencers involved actually bothered to check the viability of this event, or had the social marketing team at Jerry Media been held accountable for false advertising (unknowingly until about a week before the festival), then this disastrous event could have been avoided entirely.
Therein lies the dark power of the influencer economy. The lack of accountability and due diligence on both the influencer side and the agency side has led to many smaller cases of false advertising before, but the media spectacle of Fyre pushed this whole issue into the spotlight. Of course, according to many interviewees featured in these two documentaries, everyone had their doubts but went against their better judgment because they believed McFarland and company could come through and pull it off. But the spectacular failure of Fyre came as a wakeup call for the social influencers and agencies, as it illustrated the consequences of an influencer culture that ran amok.
This is something a lot of the social marketing agencies and some influencers themselves have reflected upon in the wake of the Fyre debacle. Since then, we have seen a gradual shift from traditional studio-led content creation and distribution to working with Influencers who function as a media property that create and distribute their content. The unique power of Influencers lies in their direct access and engagement with followers, and only brands that tap into the power of relationship-building to generate genuine and relatable content are poised to succeed. To avoid another Fyre Festival, brands and Influencers should invest in partnerships rooted in a fundamental bond and understanding of one other’s mission and values.
Holding Tech-Driven Culture Accountable
In contrast to the satirical, commentary-heavy approach of the Hulu documentary, Netflix’s Fyre took a more somber mode of storytelling to lay out the events in linear fashion, sketching out a comprehensive profile of Billy McFarland as a serial entrepreneur and a fraud. From online ad platform Spling to Magnises, a black card promising exclusive event access, to Fyre Media, then finally to “NYC VIP Access,” a fraudulent ticket-selling operation that he orchestrated while out on bail for Fyre, whenever his latest startup failed, McFarland always seemed to have the next company set up and ready to go (even while out on bail).
Through both documentaries, it is clear that Billy McFarland is a pathological liar and completely delusional, but his “career” as an entrepreneur are enabled by the worst parts of the dominant Silicon Valley culture. He is very much a product of a culture that glorifies startups that “move fast and break things” and dive head-first into the market with minimum viable products, and that is exactly the kind of mentality that McFarland has internalized and twisted into a toxic combo of delusional positive-thinking and salesmanship. He was so confident in his grand visions that he got many investors on board to fund his impractical ventures, consequences be damned.
And there were some devastating consequences. Besides the attendees who were scammed and subjected to an unpleasant experience, the local business owners and laborers were also left uncompensated for their work. Netflix highlighted one such victim named Maryann Rolle, a restaurant owner and Great Exuma resident who prepared food for the event and lost her life savings to pay off the unpaid expenses. Since the release of the documentary, the Internet has rallied to crowdfund $160,000 for her to recoup the loss, but there are still many workers whose labor went unpaid. Ironically, the social media virality that helped spread awareness for Maryann’s GoFundMe campaign is exactly the same kind of influencer dynamic that led to the Fyre Festival in the first place.
McFarland’s reality-bending, delusionally positive thinking can be easily traced back to the growth-obsessed, solution-oriented, utopian mentality that prevails in the tech industry, and it is exactly the kind of careless myopia that led to Facebook’s problematic data and privacy practices and Google’s antitrust tendencies. As the growing backlash against the tech industry suggests, people are starting to realizing the issues and ready to hold Silicon Valley accountable for enabling all the Billy McFarlands out there.
The era of unbridled growth and unchecked power is over for the tech industry. Minimum viable products must now be replaced by “minimum virtuous products” that consider and address social risks and ethics. Around the world, regulators are eager to respond to the turning tides of public sentiments and deliver a reality check on the tech industry, and many innovations such as AI and automation may be stalled in development and deployment because of that, for better or worse. Therefore, it is important for all companies to tread carefully as they optimize their targeting efforts and improve operational efficiency with the help of customer data and emerging technologies.
In a sense, the spectacular failure of Fyre festival kickstarted the discussion over the ethics and accountability of social influencers, and now, the release of these two documentaries not only reignited that discussion for many brands and agencies, but also lent itself to a deeper reflection on the current era of tech-driven culture and social values, especially given the ongoing “techlash.” How consumers react to this reevaluation of the role that technology plays in our society will set the stage for the next shift in consumer attention. If this critical view of the platform owners and their growing power ever reaches a critical mass, then there could be an interesting opening for established brands to come in and capture those audiences with a more conscientious offering.
Hulu’s Smart Release Strategy
Amidst an intensifying streaming war, there is a growing surplus of content vying for audience attention. While the Netflix release may have received better reviews from the critics, it is the Hulu team who leveraged a smart release strategy, tailored to audience behavior in the age of streaming, to ensure maximum exposure for their entry.
Unlike Netflix, which announced the release of Fyre a week beforehand, Hulu pulled a Beyonce and surprise dropped Fyre Fraud on Monday, January 14, which happened to be the same day that Netflix lifted the embargo for the reviews for Fyre. Therefore, as numerous positive reviews for Netflix’s documentary started to spread across social media, viewers who were intrigued by the topic would just be one search away to find that the Hulu documentary on the same topic is already live, available for instant consumption. By coinciding its release with the publication of the reviews, Hulu effectively stole Netflix’s thunder, who is no stranger to utilizing surprise drops to create instant buzz and grab eyeballs either.
The power of instant accessibility is hard to understate, especially in the age of streaming. As previously mentioned, the accelerating velocity at which digital culture spreads is predicated on the expectation of easy access and instant availability. The way that social buzz can quickly turn into a windfall in views has just recently been demonstrated by Netflix’s surprise hit Bird Box. Compared to the trouble of going to theaters and paying for a ticket, months after seeing the first trailer, watching something already included in your subscription at home removes a considerable amount of friction in content consumption, which, in turn, makes it so much easier for OTT services to drive audience to their content.
Thus, Hulu’s release strategy for Fyre Fraud serves as a good reminder that OTT content services usually operate on a much tighter release timeline than the traditional content distributors. In the intensifying streaming war for attention, we expect more legacy media players to learn from the OTT players and opt for a shortened timeline for their pre-release promotions, so as to adapt to the growing audience demand for instant gratification.
At the end of the day, the fact that two documentaries on Fyre Festival came out within a week of each other only amplified the buzz and boosted the cultural relevance for both. Had there only been one Fyre documentary, there wouldn’t have been as much earned media coverage comparing these two films and neither of them might have cut through the noise. In this case, one plus one was bigger than two.
