Fyre Festival: What It Means For Influencers

In a way, last week's Fyre Festival fiasco, in which visitors to a luxury festival found flooding, act cancellations and 'refugee camp'-like conditions was in many ways hilarious.

The festival, organised by Ja Rule, was the most embarrassing thing Ja Rule has been involved in since...well, any of his music that doesn't have Ashanti in it, and it's always fun to laugh at rich, deluded people. However, the failure also tells us a lot about the pitfalls and potential problems of influencer marketing.

The organisers asked aspirational people with large Instagram followers, from Victoria's Secrets Angels to whichever Jenner the kids are into now, to publicise the festival on Instagram, which lead to the festival selling out despite for all intents and purposes not being a fully realised product.

With that in mind, we asked creatives from across the industry to weigh in on what the success of the marketing campaign and huge failure of event management mean for the future of influencer marketing:

Mark Rivers, Managing Partner at Somethin’ Else

Reading the now infamous Fyre Festival investment document is pretty painful. But it bears an uncanny resemblance to a number of other marketing documents we’ve all seen pushing the power of influencers. How many times have you seen the word “squad” to describe a few young celebrities with some impressive social media numbers?

People with significant cultural clout and an audience who are interested in them will always provide value to brands who want to market to hard-to-reach customers. And this was proved by the fact that the influencers connected with the Fyre Festival convinced people to buy tickets to a festival where very little information was available about what the festival actually was.

But the Fyre festival does illustrate a wider problem with some influencer marketing.

The best of these relationships are borne from a genuine partnership between the brand or event and the influencer. A sense that they know and understand each other and are working together to create something of value. Seeing the “Fyre Squad” distance themselves from the event, and claim no or little knowledge of what it actually is, smacks of a brand who are jumping on social media numbers to sell stuff, and celebrities who are taking the money and running for the hills.

"the influencers connected with the Fyre Festival convinced people to buy tickets to a festival where very little information was available about what the festival actually was."

Jules Lund, founder at Tribe:

On the one hand it's exciting that the world now recognises the power of influencer marketing, but it’s disappointing to see celebrity influencers exploiting their followers. Once the scale of the Fyre Festival fiasco became apparent, they couldn’t hit their delete buttons fast enough. In an age of fake news, we are craving authentic online experiences more than ever. Luckily marketers are discovering effective ways to collaborate with micro-influencers - hundreds of everyday citizens - in less time, cost and risk than celebrity influencers. Steering the industry back to social media and away from socialite media.

Daniel Evans, Creative Director at Leo Burnett

Fyre Festival was a social media showcase, both in how it built up the hype and brought it crashing down. The event organisers were selling the dream, but it turned out to be out of reach for everyone involved.

It was the perfect storm - and not just the one that hit the island on the morning of the event - of entitlement and faux celebrity. Only this time these two privileged groups included a large part of the indented audience as well as the organisers themselves. Celebrities, models, musicians and influencers all coming together to mingle uninterrupted. It is hard to feel much sympathy.

Instead let's look at what this disaster has given us to chew over. The event did a classic old school ad trick of 'Sell the sizzle, not the steak'.

Secondly, it’s shown the cracks in the power held by big influencers and celebrities, both in their ability to run the show and their ability to react properly when things don't go as planned. This might ultimately drive audiences away from these bigger personalities and back towards smaller groups, where consumers feel companies can have some form of accountability.

"Hopefully it will put the emphasis back on the social and less on the influencer."

Mike Cullis, CEO at Soul:

Clearly, they attracted a lot of influential people to attend. I'm assuming they also included highly influential people / bloggers on the guest list with the aim of telling the world how amazing it was. Problem is, if the product is shit, all those people are only going to tell the world how shit it is. It comes back to Bill Bernbach's famous quote:

"A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.”

Neil Hughston, CEO, DUKE

If I’m going to spend ten grand on an event, I expect dinner with Adele and Disclosure waiting the tables. Maybe chuck in an exclusive table-side performance by Tinie Tempah and Stormzy, just for the fun of it.

But in reality, this debacle is the fake news of festivals. It highlights the arrogance of these so-called “influencers”, and the gullibility of those who allowed themselves to be “influenced”. In many ways this shows just how much power they actually have. A few candid shots of bodies on beaches and generic crowds posted on social media was enough to drum up a frenzy of excitement about an “event” that has no heritage and no track record.

Events that have a brilliant reputation work because of a few key reasons: experience and genuine quality (of the acts and experience). They work because entertainment and experience comes first and brand endorsement takes a back seat.

"This debacle is the fake news of festivals."

Thom Newton, CEO and Managing Partner, Conran Design Group

Frye Festival is a very real example of what can happen when influencer marketing is rolled out without the rigours of a good business plan being in place.

Influencer marketing and celebrity endorsement has long been used in conjunction with large scale events and these days there are even more channels to leverage the relationship. A successful partnership will result in a synergy between the personality and the product/brand. Ideally people will connect the positives between the celeb and the brand.

However, influencer marketing (like an actual relationship) can go wrong… and when it does the fallout can be catastrophic. In this instance, the media attention has been directed at the celebs who were involved in the promotional video; some of them were allegedly paid $250,000 to promote it on their own Instagram feeds. They are suffering an angry backlash from people who feel let down by their promises. This will inevitably impact their brands, which have been built on follower numbers.