The Netflix Fyre documentary is a modern-day marketing horror story
Lessons gleaned from the most disastrous marketing campaign in recent memory
Kevin M. Cook is the owner/founder of search/local HTX and a content marketing consultant based out of Houston, TX. With a background in education/pedagogy, creative writing, journalism and SEO, Kevin has done it all and seen it all, but was still shocked by Netflix’s ‘FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.’
The marketing world is abuzz, following the release of two documentaries about the so-called Fyre Festival, ‘FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,’ (Netflix; Jan. 18, 2019) and ‘Fyre Fraud,’ (Hulu; Jan. 14, 2019) within a week of one another. And rightfully so.
The fiasco, which has seen ‘mastermind’ Billy McFarland convicted of two counts of wire fraud and sentenced to six years in federal prison, has struck a chord with the American public, perhaps most notably because of its auspicious beginnings.
You may recall having seen either the original ‘orange-tile’ posts, or coverage of them.
The simultaneous posting of mysterious, solid-orange tiles from more than 100 ‘influencers’ drew plenty of media attention. Its opacity created an air of mystery. ‘What IS this?’ asked media and Instagrammers, and from just the posts, it was difficult to tell, inspiring writers and curious parties to investigate.
That, in turn, generated a storm of interest.
One important thing to note: the hashtag ‘#notanad,’ which didn’t appear on all orange-tile posts, but appeared on some, such as the one pictured above. None of the original posts disclosed that the posters were, in fact, compensated for their posting, some to the tune of five-digits or more. Kendall Jenner reportedly received $250K for her Fyre post, which assuredly did not get disclosed in any form or fashion. Jenner is one of the defendants in an as-yet-unsettled lawsuit seeking punitive damages for misleading followers, which NPR described as ‘negligent misrepresentation.’
Here’s the first thing to know about the Fyre Festival: almost everyone involved in promoting the event at any level has been accused of — or outright charged with — fraud. Fraud is the antithesis of #GoodMarketing.
Why do I use a hashtag? Because it’s something I’m passionate about, and one of the things my company does content-wise is cover examples of what I think qualify as #GoodMarketing or #BadMarketing.
Fyre Festival engaged almost exclusively in #BadMarketing.
What is #BadMarketing, pray tell? I’m glad you asked.
#BadMarketing
In a word, #BadMarketing is lying. Opacity, misinformation, lies of omission, outright fabrication — any and all of these are the tools of the bad marketer.
It’s easy to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that Fyre was an absolute disaster and was doomed to fail from the beginning. But it was. And the breadcrumbs that could and should have led any rational, thinking human being to that conclusion are right there from the jump.
How, without money changing hands, do you get more than 100 Instagram users with hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions, of followers to post something simultaneously? You don’t, because you can’t. The world doesn’t work that way. Instagram doesn’t work that way. Influencers are influencers because it’s rewarding, not just in a fiscal sense, but also definitely in a fiscal sense.
There were red flags right from the start. In an SEO podcast on which I was recently a guest, I described watching FYRE:TGPTNH as an experience akin to watching a horror film. I think it might fall under a new genre you could fairly call Marketing-Horror.
At every turn, I was cringing and yelling at the screen, ‘DON’T DO THAT,’ ‘DON’T GO IN THERE!’ ‘DON’T DON’T DON’T,’ which — for the record — I usually do not do in actual horror movies. I’ve never been attacked by a slasher or alien or ghost, but I encounter #BadMarketing all the time, and this film hit close to home in a way that, say, Freddy Vs. Jason or The Conjuring did not.
The most horrifying thing was how easy it was to put myself in the place of the marketers profiled in the movie (now is probably a good time to mention that the Netflix documentary, the one I’ve mostly been referring to, was co-produced by Jerry Media… the primary marketing agency involved in crafting the Fyre marketing strategy re: the festival).
Everyone involved was beyond psyched at how well the initial campaign launch went off. The orange-tile posts generated exactly the kind of media buzz they had hoped for, and the initial ‘commercial’ with a dozen of the world’s top supermodels frolicking on picturesque beaches, drew the same kind of, ‘whoa — WHAT is going ON here?’ interest the firm had hoped for and promised.
The documentary, in part thanks to McFarland’s policy of always-running cameras, allows us to go inside the scene at the actual beach, though. At one point, self-proclaimed rap mogul Ja Rule (McFarland’s literal partner in crime) pressures the models — who have not been off the clock in any sense since they arrived on the island — to take off their swimsuits and rush into the surf with him, and when they resist (‘Hell no!’ in the words of one), he reminds them that they’re here to work, and this is part of the gig.
That is reprehensible. Using women’s bodies to sell products is already morally questionable ground, in my opinion (the Dove Real Bodies campaign is an interesting counterpoint, but I still balk at turning human bodies into marketing tools; it strikes me as dehumanizing and leads to situations like the one I’m describing, in which objectification and professional duties intersect), but Ja Rule’s using the fact that the women were ‘on the job’ to coerce them into swimming nude with him is #MeToo territory.
I haven’t set up a lot of model photo shoots (or any), in part because I don’t like the tactic of selling-with-sex (even though, empirically, sex does sell), but as I understand it, typically in these situations, models are given call-times and a very concrete idea of when they are working/shooting, and when they are not. When Ja Rule asked them to remove their clothes and parade into the ocean with him, they were gathered, drinking, around a fire at some point late in an evening. There was palpable confusion about when, exactly, they were working and when they were partying, and nobody associated with Fyre did anything to disabuse them of that confusion, because it worked to their advantage.
If you’re sensing a pattern, you’re way ahead of me: At every stage, and at every turn, Billy McFarland, Ja Rule and the rest of the Fyre gang were obfuscating, deceiving and misleading. It was — in a very real sense — the crux of their marketing strategy.
That’s #BadMarketing.
#GoodMarketing
By contrast, #GoodMarketing is transparency. #GoodMarketing is content that resonates with clients and customers, content they’re happy to see and receive and content that paints an accurate and full picture of the company it represents.
Notable in the Fyre marketing campaign is how they immediately screwed up their location, right out of the gate. The owner of the island they planned to use, Norman’s Cay, had an agreement with McFarland: absolutely no mention of the fact that the island used to be a haunt of Pablo Escobar’s. McFarland agreed, but in the first post-orange-tile promotion of the event, he blasted out that the party would be held on ‘Pablo Escobar’s private island.’
Obfuscation and deception. McFarland had already decided how he wanted to brand and promote the island festival, and he either thought the island’s owner wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care.
He was wrong. And he could have known he would be wrong, because he was told explicitly that the owner cared.
As a consequence, McFarland and Fyre lost the location they had planned for (‘planned’ is generous), and were scrambling almost immediately, ultimately selecting a non-private-island (all of the marketing literature billed the festival as occurring on a ‘private island’) which was fundamentally unsuited to the task he and his company had in mind.
Don’t lie. Never, ever lie. Lying is the soul of #BadMarketing, just as transparency is the soul of #GoodMarketing. It was at this point in the doc that I grabbed my blanket close, and started shivering and shouting at the screen. And I didn’t stop.
For the next 90 minutes, I watched — speechless, except for the occasional horrified, instinctual shouting — as McFarland (in front of rolling cameras he knew were there!) cut right, cut left, zigging and zagging and lying to person after person. When he was approached by the marketing companies he had contracted with, and they told him, ‘you’re lying, and we don’t want to be a part of that,’ he summarily fired them and hired marketers who were more willing to go along with his deceptions.
McFarland is now in prison, but the marketers are not. Is that right? I don’t know, honestly. I’ve spoken with many peers and colleagues about what ethical duties and responsibilities the marketers had, and there is no general consensus. I think everyone fears being held legally liable or accountable for the actions of their clients. Sometimes, even without meaning to, we marketing agencies sign clients who aren’t totally above-board, and it’s not always easy to tell at a glance if that’s what we’re dealing with.
However, a policy of total transparency — what we at search/local term glasnost — saves having to make those kinds of distinctions. It might result in not signing an unethical client here or there, but in the long run, that’s a win in and of itself.
For businesses, it means this: sign an ethics-based marketing agency, one that is unafraid to tell you, ‘we don’t do that, and we don’t think you should, either.’ Find a marketing agency that has an ironclad policy of transparency, and won’t venture outside of it for ‘the perfect score.’ After all, the orange-tile and supermodel-party campaigns were ‘successful,’ in the sense that they generated interest, but is that the only standard for success? The clicks, views and engagement don’t exist in a vacuum — they go somewhere. They represent real human beings in front of their devices, with real needs, wants and agency.
Marketing is a set of tools. Like any tools, they can be employed for good or ill, and — just like in life — the ends never justify the means. McFarland may well have been The Smartest Guy in the Room, but for the next few years, he’ll be the smartest guy in his cell, and deservedly so.
Here’s the ultimate lesson I learned from Fyre and the documentaries associated with it: tell the truth. Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If those principles are firmly in place, there is no end to the amount of creative, innovative campaigns that can be devised. Without those principles, any creativity or innovation is likely just an acceleration on the road to perdition.
If you have questions about your company’s current marketing strategy, or how to examine it for ethical missteps or violations, feel free to reach out to us at search/local. We’re in business, but more than that, we’re part of a community. We’re happy to have a conversation with you about right and wrong, whether or not it leads to any further or deeper business relationship. We see it as an ethical duty, and the only way to counteract the actions and philosophies of the Billy McFarlands of the world.
