“Influencers”: burnt by the Fyre Festival
One of many things we’ve learnt from Netflix’s new documentary about the Fyre Festival fraud of 2017 is how much money “influencers” can make, said Sam Wolfson in The Guardian. In an attempt to create an online buzz about the festival, its organisers paid celebrities tens of thousands of dollars to endorse it on social media. Kendall Jenner was allegedly paid $250,000 for one post. And so it was that US millennials were duped into buying tickets for a festival that didn’t exist. They were told they’d be spending three days partying on a paradise island in the Bahamas; a promo video showed supermodels posing on white sand and diving into azure waters. But when the punters who were flogged this fantasy turned up, they found that their “luxury” lodges were rain-sodden emergency tents on waste ground; the catering consisted of cheese sandwiches in styrofoam boxes; there were no supermodels; the bands had been cancelled. The event’s promoter – one Billy Mcfarland – is serving six years for fraud.
There was schadenfreude to be had in watching these rich kids get unstuck, said Jenny Eclair in The Independent. On the other hand, one local trader employed by the festival lost $50,000 (a crowdfunding campaign has repaid her), and the film cast a dismal light on our Instagram-addicted culture. “This was a festival sold on excess.” The bands were incidental; people didn’t come for the music, but for the selfie potential. They forked out for an event they knew nothing about because they wanted “to show the world via their social media accounts that they’d made it”. But “the real takeaway is not that millennials” are idiots who “will spend their life savings in pursuit of a good Instagram post”, said Bryan Rolli in Forbes. It’s that they’ve been convinced that they need to do this. It’s the commercial forces driving this phenomenon that need examining.
We could start with the influencers, said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. “All advertising is premised on the selling of an ideal, but the efficiency with which influencers” use curated personal photo streams to make their followers feel inadequate, “then sell them products to fix their sad little lives, is creepier than anything it predates”. Influencers have become so powerful, brands are expected to pay them $6.5bn this year, said The Times; now, in the UK, the authorities have warned them that they must make this commercial relationship very clear – or risk fines or jail. It may not stop the kind of false advertising used to promote the Fyre Festival, but it is a welcome first step.