It is a Monday and what better day to share a marketing case study?
“Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” is a must-see documentary for marketing and public relations professionals.
The documentary is about the Fyre Music Festival which was touted as “the event of the decade.” The event was highly promoted using advertising and influencer marketing using supermodels including Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid. Sadly, the event did not hold and has been called “the biggest fraud of the year,” that is, the year 2019.
What went wrong?
Putting the cart before the horse
The organisers, tech entrepreneur Billy McFarland and his partner, rapper Ja Rule, launched a marketing campaign and began selling tickets before fully crystallising the event concept. They skipped the planning and budgeting phase and generally went with the flow.
Lack of requisite skills
A lot of decisions were vested in the Fyre marketing director who had no event management skills. By the time he decided to hire experts to do the job, the timing was short and Fyre realised that they did not have the funds to deliver the calibre of event advertised.
Pride
When it became clear that there would be nothing luxurious about the music concert, his team advised him to communicate that to those who had bought tickets, but McFarland allowed his ego to get in the way and declined. Had he listened, the damage would have been minimised.
No crisis communication plan
For a music festival or concert, standard PR practice would include conducting a pre-event risk assessment and the development of a crisis response plan. But there was none.
Lack of ethics
The entire event was built on lies and fluff. The advertising made false promises. It claimed that the music festival would hold on a private island once owned by Pablo Escobar and McFarland lied that he had bought the island.
In the end, “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” had just as much negative publicity as the positive publicity it generated when the concert was announced.
“Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” is streaming on Netflix.
