The Fyre Festival & The Power of Influencers

The Fyre festival was perhaps the most talked about festival even before it was deemed a scam. How did the festival generate so much media and sales?

Influencer marketing at its finest.

Promo videos featured top models such as Kendal Jenner, Gigi Hadid and Hailey Baldwin dancing in bikinis on boats in the beautiful islands of the Bahamas. And no, they weren’t photoshopped. These celebrities were actually endorsing the event not knowing the complete disaster it would turn out to be.

Not only was the Fyre festival team using celebrities in promotional videos, they were also getting celebrities to post on their Instagram an orange square that featured a caption about the upcoming Festival. So right off the bat you have an unconventional way of capturing the audience’s attentions and generating a lot of media about this orange square that so many celebrities are posting. It was basically marketed as Coachella but on steroids. And everyone wanted to be part of it.

I think this creative execution for branding the event was unique and did its job; it caught the attention of the world, it generated media and buzz, and most importantly it generated ticket sales. So, even though it was so simple, this branding strategy ultimately accomplished what it set out to accomplish.

With that being said, I don’t think for a second the branding strategy would have lived long if the faces behind the posts weren’t celebrities and super models. If this company called Fyre media came out with these promotion videos without the use of celebrities and used orange squares to promote the event I would honestly think it was a scam. But they were smart in that they utilized people with millions of loyal followers to do the marketing for them. That made the festival believable and so attractive to so many people, hence how tickets were sold out in a few days.

Moral of the story? Influencer marketing can get you a long way.