Fyre: The most unsuccessful, successful marketing campaign

Fyre Festival was supposed to be a once in a lifetime luxury music experience, as social media portrayed it would be.

A documentary about Fyre Festival can be viewed on Netflix (FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened) and shows that experience marketing can be extremely powerful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz5kY3RsmKo

This YouTube video shows footage used to initially promote the Fyre Festival. It doesn't focus on selling and promoting, (they didn't use ads) but rather sharing of an experience that can excite a wide range of viewers, basically, a dream.

Also, by using famous influencers with a strong online social media presence added to the coverage online, particularly capitalising on millennial consumption habits. Nearly 400 influencers named 'Fyre Starters', all having hundreds of thousands of followers each, posted the same bright orange tile on Instagram in unison - this grabbed the attention of viewers to lead them to the video link.
(Using specific colours can cause a certain reaction, the colour orange is the colour of enthusiasm and extroversion and is very attention-grabbing).

Furthermore, influencers are an effective marketing tactic to spread brand awareness to a global market in a matter of days, or even a matter of hours. Especially for millenials who see these post and dream to live the life of these influencers (and through this festival, they thought they could).



The biggest mistake with the social media campaign is that a large amount of the information they shared was false/misleading. Marketing campaigns should put forth truthful and transparent images/information.

To conclude, I believe that if Fyre Festival had been in fact what it was shown to be, it would have been one of, if not the top, social media marketing campaigns of the century.