Fyre Festival: The Real Cost of Blowing A Corporate Event

Whether or not you work in the marketing industry, you’ve no doubt heard about the disastrous Fyre Festival, a 3-day luxury music festival located on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas, which launched in April 2017. The festival’s founders Billy McFarland, the CEO of Fyre Media Inc., and rapper Ja Rule, initially created the event to promote the company’s Fyre app, an application for booking musical talent.

What started out as a dream vacation that boasted white sandy beaches, musical performances, and celebrity encounters ended up devolving into a chaotic scene. The event launched despite developmental issues, allowing guests to arrive when the conditions were not only unacceptable but unsafe.

Described as “closer to The Hunger Games or Lord of the Flies than Coachella,” resulted in various lawsuits and a 6-year-long prison sentence for founder Billy McFarland after he pled guilty to defrauding investors in multiple ticketing schemes. Additionally, separate documentaries released on the streaming services Hulu (Fyre Fraud) and Netflix (Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened).

Since many of the Fyre Festival’s failings were the consequence of poor planning, disorganization, and false advertising, many of the event’s management mistakes could have been avoided with the proper planning and a more efficient team. If your company is planning on hosting a similar corporate event, it’s important to learn from the Fyre Festival’s miscalculations and to keep them in mind during the development of your brand’s corporate event. Here are some of the lessons event managers can learn from the Fyre Festival fiasco:

Don’t Promote What You Can’t Deliver

The event’s viral marketing campaign, which successfully did its job of capturing the attention of its target audience, ended up being the cherry on top of the collapsed soufflé since it promoted a vision the Fyre Festival team couldn’t deliver. A good portion of the budget was sunk into recruiting “Fyre starters,” influencers such as Kendall Jenner (whom McFarland paid $250,000 for one Instagram post) and Bella Hadid who promoted the festival on social media and encouraged their followers to attend.

The early advertisements for the Fyre Festival boasted a lavish event on the sun-soaked private island of Norman’s Cay in the Exumas, formerly owned by Pablo Escobar. Among the amenities, attendees were promised included gourmet catering, a chance to mingle with famous celebrities and models, transportation to the site on a private jet, and luxury tents or private villas to stay in.

What guests actually received, after paying $1K to $125K for the luxury treatment, was not a stay on a private island, but on an undeveloped plot of land next to a Sandals resort. Guests waited for hours at the airport for transportation, gourmet meals were plain cheese sandwiches, zero celebrities were in attendance, and the luxury accommodations were refugee-camp style tents that were drenched from a storm the night before.

After spending so much time and money on the marketing campaigns and recruiting influencers, the event management team were left with an insufficient budget to follow-through on all of the promises they made to their guests. If marketers take away anything from the Fyre Festival debacle, it’s the lesson that promising less to consumers will ensure that your company’s corporate event will not only fulfill those promises, but will exceed expectations and associate your brand with honesty and trust.

Cancel Event If Business Plan Fails

In a statement to Rolling Stone, Billy McFarland maintained that he and the Fyre Fest team “were overwhelmed and just didn’t have the foresight to solve all these problems.” Despite McFarland’s claims, it became evident from the statements of other employees that McFarland and the other Fyre Festival executives had many opportunities to cancel the project.

According to Chloe Gordon, a former talent producer for the Fyre Festival, a meeting was held on location in the Bahamas in March 2017 between Ja Rule, other Fyre Festival executives, and the event planners to discuss next steps now that the project was low on funds and lacked the proper amount of time to complete the project by April. When these concerns were raised by the event planners and it was suggested that the project be postponed until 2018, one of the members of the marketing team reportedly said to Ja Rule, “Let’s just do it and be legends, man.” After the budget meeting in March, two more opportunities to abandon the project arose once musical guests began to drop out of the event and a rainstorm soaked the guest’s tents the morning of the festival.

If your event management team comes across any complications of this kind during the developmental stages of the project, it’s better to cancel the entire event than to give your guests a substandard consumer experience. The choice to continue with the event despite the initial warning signs resulted in a negative and almost traumatic experience for the consumer as well an onslaught of bad social media coverage, which irreversibly damaged the public’s perception of Fyre Media Inc.’s corporate culture.

Select An Efficient and Professional Team

When planning any large-scale corporate event, it’s important to select an efficient and professional team, from executive management to low-level employees. Many of the failings of the Fyre Festival seemed to result from the executives’ poor management skills, who treated the project more like an unrealistic fantasy rather than as a business venture.

An anonymous festival organizer told Rolling Stone that one of the reasons the Fyre Festival didn’t succeed was due to their backwards approach to planning and promotion. “Their approach was, ‘We thought up the idea, we put tickets on sale, then we decided on marketing and talent and tried to see if the venue would work,’” said the source. “The traditional way of promoting a festival is: Find a great site, make sure it works, then select some talent and put together marketing and put tickets on sale. They took the traditional method and did it the opposite way. It seems like you should know if there’s running water before you put on a festival on your site.”

Not only did the Fyre Festival executives fail to effectively organize the event before promoting it to their target demographic, but there was a lack of professionalism, inclusivity, and a presence of toxic misogyny at the root of Fyre’s corporate culture. Employees of the Fyre Festival stated that the organizers exhibited “boys’ club” behavior, which included speaking degradingly about women during conference meetings. Maintaining a professional and inclusive corporate environment will ensure that every member of your team is being utilized for their expertise and talents. Teamwork is paramount for a successful corporate event to run smoothly from the planning stages to execution.

Before planning your company’s next corporate event, marketers should evaluate the failures of large-scale projects like the Fyre Festival in order to avoid repeating them at their own event. The main takeaway event managers should glean from the Fyre Fest disaster is that the real cost of blowing a corporate event is the foundation of trust between brands and their consumers. Every action taken by your team should be done with the consumer in mind, to establish a connection and bring your guests a positive, enjoyable experience.

[Originally produced for an event management company associated with Marketing Insider Group in June 2019]