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How to Prevent Another Fyre Festival

How to Prevent Another Fyre Festival

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Everything is Billy McFarland’s fault.

The Fyre Festival creator is a sham and a fraud, a con artist who deliberately manipulated and deceived investors, ticket holders, and employees. He’s a sociopath, we were told by documentaries out in January, one by Hulu LLC and another by Netflix Inc. “It’s on me,” McFarland conceded in an interview with Hulu’s producers, for which he was paid. He’s now serving a six-year federal prison sentence.

Before it became the schadenfreude delight of the decade, the Fyre Festival was promoted on Instagram and beyond as an ultra-exclusive music festival, a luxurious experience on a remote island in the Bahamas with some of the world’s biggest celebrities and influencers; ridiculously wealthy millennials spent as much as $250,000 on tickets. But in the end, “luxurious” meant scattered disaster relief tents, stranded guests, stolen baggage, minimal food and water, no plumbing, no cell service—and no music acts to speak of.

McFarland was in charge of the finances, but what caused Fyre to be such a colossal flare-up was marketing. It was for a brief moment in time “the best coordinated social influencer campaign ever,” as described in the Netflix doc. Jerry Media, the social media marketing company hired by Fyre, planned to “stop the internet.” Cue videos of exotic Bahamian beaches, recherché food, and yachts idling just offshore.

How to Prevent Another Fyre Festival

And the group promoted it hard, until the bitter end, only to shrug off any responsibility as soon as the truth was revealed. Suddenly, influencers were denying the power of their influence, and marketing agencies were downplaying the success of their campaigns. “If you get hired to do a BMW commercial, and that BMW then has a faulty engine, how the f--- can you possibly know whether they were going to do good on what they said they were going to do?” asked Brett Kincaid of Matte Projects LLC, which was also involved in promoting Fyre, during the Netflix documentary.

The two films take different approaches to culpability. The Hulu version is holistic, including quotes such as “Who’s to blame? Everybody.” Also: Should “Kendall Jenner, who allegedly gets $250,000 a post, have any level of responsibility?” Oren Aks, a designer on the social media campaign, asks, “What have I done? My child is like Satan.”

Netflix essentially frames everybody but McFarland as a victim in its doc co-produced by Jerry Media. (Yes, the same company that created an entire illusion was charged with painting an accurate picture of the events that unfolded.)

Yet in the lead-up to the debacle, instead of disclosing the truth, Jerry Media actively hid problems in the key final hours. It even silenced critics. Attendees asking questions about logistics on social media were blocked. Any comments that included the words “fake,” “details,” “flight,” “fraud,” “scam,” and even “information” were deleted within seconds.

Moving further down the responsibility ladder, what about the supermodels paid to boost the event? Jenner, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Hailey Bieber collectively amass almost 163 million followers on Instagram alone.

To encourage transparency for consumers, the Federal Trade Commission has become increasingly aggressive in requiring influencers to disclose if they’re being paid to promote a good or service by using hashtags like #sponsored, #ad, or #paidcontent. In 2017 the FTC sent a series of warning letters to about 90 celebrities; violating the endorsement guidelines allows the commission to impose fines or injunctions. But “the guidelines don’t have the force of law,” says Richard Newman, an FTC advertising compliance attorney.

It may seem silly—models don’t pretend to be objective, like journalists—but as the Fyre documentaries prove, the consequences of misleading followers can be quite serious. Ratajkowski was reportedly the only one who used the hashtag #ad. Hadid apologized to her fans. Most of them, including Jenner, have since deleted their posts.

And what about the marketers?

“Everyone in the chain that’s involved in the [social media] post” falls under the FTC’s guidelines, says David Klein, an internet marketing attorney. “This would be those who are doing the post, the influencer, the company that’s been hired to get the word out.” Enforcing fines on this type of thing, especially in such a public case, could discourage future repeats, according to the compliance lawyer Newman.

Both Jerry Media and the influencers claim they didn’t know anything. The films, even Jerry Media’s, indicate otherwise. Whether they can be held responsible hinges on that knowledge and whether the agencies were aware they were engaging in meaningful deception. Perhaps attorney Ben Meiselas says it best in the Hulu documentary: “Don’t just focus on Billy. … There are people who helped Billy commit fraud so that they could make their money.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net, Chris Rovzar

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