Fyre Festival – a great example in how good Instagram marketing can help your business sell

If you haven’t yet seen the Netflix documentary, Fyre, it’s certainly worth a watch. Not just for gems such as watching poor Andy King who was asked to take one for the team to get the festival attendees access to drinking water (shout out to Andy who now has his own campaign with Evian), but for the marketing lessons that can be learned.

Fyre Festival was organised by Billy McFarland (currently serving the remainder of his sentence for fraud) and Ja Rule (bizarrely cleared of any wrong-doing), taking place back in 2017 and known for being the festival that never was – a fraudulent “luxury” music festival in the Bahamas full of rich-kids who could afford the up to $12,000 per ticket, only to arrive and find that there were no amenities, no flashy influencers wandering about, and their luxury accommodation were FEMA tents. Eventually, the festival-goers needed to be rescued from the island by plane.

As the chaos unfolded live on social media, I was very much one of those who thought it was hysterical that a bunch of the wealthy elite had been conned into handing their money over to attend a “luxury” event and instead were eating Cheese Singles and sleeping in hurricane disaster-relief tents.

But how did this even happen to begin with? How did 50 Cent’s arch-nemesis and an unknown owner of a card-based membership club get so many people to buy tickets and genuinely believe that this was going to be a “once in a lifetime event”?

Marketing.

Because no matter what you say about the festival that never was, Fyre Festival’s marketing campaign on Instagram was… well… fire.

The organisers knew what worked – the hired the influencers that their target audience loved and wished to emanate – Rich Millenials. They called these influencers “Fyre Starters” (clever and so on brand, but nauseating all at once); hiring 400 of them on Instagram with a co-ordinated influencer marketing campaign, they managed to sell out tickets and reached an audience of 300 million people, all in just 48 hours.

As shown with Fyre Festival, influencer marketing can give you an extraordinary reach, especially if you use the right influencers that you know your target audience already follows. Although Fyre Festival did massively blow their budget (thus the event outcome) on these influencers, it worked. According to a study by AdWeek, 92% of millennials trust social media influencers far more than traditional celebrity marketing. But instead of spending all your company cash on big-name influencers like Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber, why not focus on micro-influencers to market your company’s products and services?

Gartner’s 2017 analysis on influencer efficiency shows that engagement is actually just as high as micro-influencers (<70,000 followers) as they are with the megastars (7 million+ followers). And that’s what it really is about – engagement. Instagram micro-influencers tend to have great engagement with their followers, due to their coming across as ‘relateable’ and ‘just like me’. There’s no need to blow the budget on a post by one of the Kardashians – look at those local to your business who have a decent following and whose message and ethos your business emanates with, and work on a campaign together with a reasonable budget.

Fyre Festival really made something out of nothing by creating a visually stunning brand on Instagram – from their beautiful trailers to their orange-themed posts, their branding really did give off the image that they wanted to portray – glamorous, luxurious, and totally recognisable.

Created by a brilliant graphic designer at Jerry Media, their feed was a beautiful mix of x2 colours (a shade of orange and blue) with photos of models, ultra-influencers and beach scenery with the logo scattered throughout, Fyre Festival made themselves memorable, lust-worthy, and really did make their brand through this. The feed was one thing, but they also combined their Instagram feed branding with their specific orange colour and their army of Fyre Starters. Paying them to post a solid orange square all at the same time as a way of announcing the festival was genius. Creating a buzz and with something so different from the usual influencer posts, they got people talking and curious about what exactly the Fyre Festival was.

Then, through their beautiful branding, evoking emotions from people who wanted to be there, just like the mega influencers, and selling out at an alarming speed.

Although the Fyre Festival was a complete sham and disaster of an event that will go down in infamy, its Instagram Marketing was certainly a success story.

But Fyre Festival wasn’t the only one that went on to use this infamy for its marketing; Evian came up with the genius “So Good, You’d Do Anything For It” partnership with Andy King following with the Netflix documentary which arguably wouldn’t have been as successful as it had been without Andy’s statements regarding how he was asked to procure water for the attendees in peril. Ja Rule sold the Fyre Festival logo as an NFT for $122,000. Jerry Media is doing extremely well.

Instagram: @realandyking | Event Producer Andy King, who became more famous than the infamous “Fyre Festival Cheese Sandwich”, thanks to his feature in the Netflix Documentary