“Influencer Marketing” the Myth of Online Authenticity
Fyre Festial was billed as a new kind of music festival, and oh, that it was.
You know the expression where there is smoke there is fire? Well in this case, where there was Fyre, there was a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.
For anyone holding out hope that the “authentic” photos and videos they see on social media are anything but fabricated advertisements, that bubble has been burst.
Organizers poised Fyre Festival as the next must-attend destination for trendy millennials, set to surpass the likes of Coachella and Bonaroo as the destination for the Instagram set who are always on the hunt for a new vista to pose in front of and a viral hashtag to call their own. In true 2017 style, their pitch deck to sponsors and investors relied heavily on the power and prowess of social media “influencers” to lure crowds to the event. And it seemed to work.
According to the pitch materials, within two days, the social media campaign to stir up attention and interest in the event garnered “300 million social impressions,” the collective sum of clicks, views and likes.
In exchange for A-lister treatment — being flown to the event and put up in luxury accommodations — these influencers, who the festival dubbed “Fyre Starters,” were enlisted to help spread “shareable” social media posts promoting the event, including photos and video of models exiting from private jets and playing in the aqua blue waters of Bahamas, where the festival was set to be held.
The very unfunny punchline is that when attendees showed up to the beachside music fest last month, none of these luxury trimmings were anywhere to be seen. In fact, there was barely any food or shelter, let alone the five-star service ticket holders had been promised. All around, stranded attendees called it a disaster. One person even went so far as to compare their setup to “FEMA tents.”
While many of those attendees are now suing festival organizers for fraud to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the rest of us will soon forget all about this calamity of expectations. Once it’s no longer in the headlines, Fyre Festival and its roster of influential “Fyre Starters” will be nothing more than a bad memory, and a bad pun.
But it brings up a bigger issue, one we’d be wise to take heed to. Social media is supposed to be “real.” That’s its premise. When we talk about the content on a platform like Instagram, as opposed to say, network television, we use words like authentic and spontaneous to describe it. Celebrities post candid-looking photos with the same set of filters that are available on our phones. We get a glimpse into people’s lives and relationships through the snippets they post to their social media accounts, supposedly in real time.
Of course, somewhere along the line, advertisers realized that they could cash in by having the social media stars with the biggest followings subtly sell their wares. And so, slowly but surely, the “Instagram famous” started posing — and posting — in designer sunglasses, sipping brand named sodas, and yes, attending hot ticket and high priced events. In exchange, they receive big pay checks for their ability to sway the minds — and wallets — of their social media followers.
Some of those who are cashing in on their massive followings are mainstream celebs, but often, these influencers are people who have built their fame through their own social media channels. That, initially, was lauded as a victory for the Internet — regular folks could create their own fame by fostering their own followings — and reap the rewards in a new system, without traditional gatekeepers. It was hailed as democratizing, levelling the playing field.
But there’s a lot of mythology and a lot of hype that muddies the pristine vision of “authenticity” and “transparency” that these social media stars trade in. For starters, many admit to taking upwards of a hundred photos, just to capture that one, perfect “spontaneous” shot. And if you look closely, many of the top accounts, especially the lifestyle and travel ones, feature high quality DSRL images — a format not inherently supported by Instagram. That means that these creators are conducting photoshoots with a professional grade camera, processing the images, and then transferring it to a mobile device where it can be uploaded to a site like Instagram, designed to feature our mobile shots. It’s a time intensive workaround. But the blurred line between candid and staged social media accounts has proved profitable enough that the Federal Trade Commission now requires that promotional posts be explicit about the fact that they are advertising goods (something that none of the posts leading up to Fyre Festival did, by the way).
No doubt, brands have been enamored by the fact that the pretense of these accounts is that they feature real people, in real situations, so when they promote products their followers assume they must really like what they’re selling. But the truth is, it’s just a new platform for the same old image manufacturing that advertisers have been conducting for years, in which fast food gets shellacked and hair sprayed to make it look fresh and mouthwatering in photos.
Fyre Festival was the last burn. Now that its embarrassing failure is behind us, the time is overdue to acknowledge that this new wave of influencer marketing is just as fabricated as advertising has ever been.
