Fyre Festival was a disaster and thanks to the Netflix & Hulu documentaries that were released recently there’s been a ton of buzz around the con as well as the strategies and tactics used by the event and the agencies working on it.

After watching both Fyre Festival documentaries on Netflix and Hulu I sat back on my couch with the tv off for well over an hour taking notes on my feelings and thoughts for the shit show that was the Festival, the horrible human con man Billy McFarland, how badly I felt for those that paid money to attend the event and also all those screwed out of money and never paid for the work they completed…

But beyond all that I was also sick to my stomach at how HORRIBLE both documentaries portrayed and SHAMED the attendee’s of this event, millennials as a generation, value of social media, role of influencer marketing and role/impact of digital marketing agencies!

The entire Fyre Festival is a case study in itself of what BAD people can do with great power and visibility but I would take it a step further and say both of these documentaries took it upon themselves to attack industries, generations, and professions based on this one massive one big bad example.

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I preach on every stage that we MUST focus more on the good people doing good things to drown out the bad while learning from the bad examples but understanding they are the exceptions, not the rules!

After watching both documentaries and looking over my notes I decided to do my own research online reading 20+ blogs that covered the event and watching each documentary a second time to see if my opinion and thoughts changed while also doing my best to focus this time on only the business lessons learned.

I will admit it was hard to focus only on the business lessons while watching as both documentaries are very slanted in their portrayal of the event with each having their own agenda which as a marketer I completely understand and can see through while also believing that many who watched these documentaries aren’t as aware of which inspired me to do my best to filter the noise and break down my insights into two different sections, the Fyre Festival event itself and the documentaries.

On this episode I cover:

  • What was the Fyre Festival and why it has all this buzz today?
  • Why the strategy of the festival itself was genius?
  • How the power of collaboration was on display and why it worked
  • How I feel both documentaries did a BAD job at keeping agenda out of the films and one of them did a much worse job than the other.
  • What marketing lessons we can learn from this:
    • App Marketing Strategy
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Video Marketing
    • Influencer Marketing
    • Experience Marketing
    • FOMO Marketing
    • Millennial Marketing
  • Why the shamming and blame labeled towards millennials is nasty and does nothing but distance generations.
  • Why the influencer marketing strategy used for this event was GENIUS and what aspects led to it having so much power?
  • Power of Social Good
  • How we as consumers must focus on educating eachother on doing our research to not empower the scam artists and con men not just blame and hate on others!

Now I didn’t attend the event and although I followed it closely on social media prior to the event and as the event was taking place I won’t claim to know everything rather I wanted to share my thoughts based on what I’ve read and what I watched of the documentaries.

Side Note: There are so many lessons that can be learned from this but one that I hope we highlight is that GOOD PEOPLE will rally for GOOD PEOPLE always and that’s the case with the GoFundMe account happening right now raising money for the owner of the Exuma Point restaurant already raising over 180k+:https://www.gofundme.com/exuma-point-fyre-fest-debt and a second GoFundMe for the workers of Bahrain: https://www.gofundme.com/the-exuma-foundation-for-victims-of-fyre-festival

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