It is Sunday afternoon, you’ve heard people on the bus talking about it, you’ve seen it in the Super Bowl adverts and you’ve probably seen the memes…FYRE festival has made a return to the tip of tongues with the thanks to the latest Netflix documentary.
The power of influencers was truly seen in the marketing campaign for FYRE festival. A group of the world’s most influential supermodels and internet personalities promoted the luxury event by posting an orange square on Instagram and sharing a single promotional video. In just 48 hours, the festival sold a reported 81% of tickets, each ranging from $450 up to $100,000.
FYRE created a whole new paradigm for marketing music festivals. Normally festivals have to spend years creating a brand, generating marketing material, raising capital and hoping for satisfied consumers to help via word of mouth, in order to market themselves successfully. However, FYRE was able to generate a huge amount of hype and sell out all of its tickets with an orange square, single promotional video and group of social media influencers.
We now know the festival was a shambles from start to finish and guests were horrified to have paid thousands of dollars for hurricane shelter tents, cheese sandwiches and no music. The main organiser is in jail and the brand has been destroyed. However, that is because the festival itself was poorly organised. It is not because of the marketing strategy, which, in a strange paradox, was a success.
This documentary on the FYRE scandal has put the spotlight on influencer marketing. Questions are being asked about how can we, as an industry, ensure that another influencer-fuelled failure doesn’t happen again. The challenge is for everyone to solve: platforms, influencers, brands and newly forming regulators, how can we ensure a sustainable future for this dynamic, highly effective marketing a
At Influnique, our core mission is to provide brands with as much transparency for an Influencer’s audience, so they might get an accurate picture of the anticipated reach across their social media campaigns. This will enable brands to make the right decision about which influencers and how many of them the appropriate brand needs to use.
