Once the ad of Bella Hadid writhing in a bikini on a boat hit the internet, the deal was done. Abjectly thirsty Instagram fans slavered over the mysterious squares, wondering what the popular kids knew that they didn’t. Every ticket to Fyre Festival was sold off the back of a single advertisement, featuring supermodels cavorting in the Bahamas, plus the social media placement that spread that advertisement across the world.īefore even airing the advertisement, Fyre Festival paid a huge quantity of social media influencers to tease the event by posting orange squares to their Instagram accounts. But nobody would have ever bought tickets to the event if his press people hadn’t presented such a false image of the product for sale. To what extent does Oren Aks, for example, bear responsibility for this disaster? McFarland was the huckster in the middle, of course. By foregrounding shallow Instagram influencers and the employees of Jerry Media-an agency that sprang from a cheap-gag Instagram account called to helm the multi-million-dollar marketing campaign for Fyre Festival- Fyre Fraud directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason show that this debacle could, and probably will, happen again. There are details in this film that do not make it into Hulu’s, such as an unnamed person at the top of Fyre who was extorting Billy for cash.įyre Fraud ultimately surpasses Fyre because, in addition to having access to the man at the center of it all, it is better at drawing out the social forces that facilitated McFarland’s crimes. But the Netflix version goes deepest into McFarland’s criminal activities. Due to horrendously poor organization and a cash flow problem that escalated into wire fraud, the event was a catastrophe.īoth films aptly excavate the financial crimes that McFarland committed, and both name and shame the naïve mega-rich investors-like Carola Jain, wife of Credit Suisse juggernaut Bob-who poured their cash into his fraudulent bucket. McFarland and Ja Rule then tried to promote the app through a luxury music festival in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017. Ja Rule was on board as a partner, and the app was valued highly. The idea was that regular people could pay famous people to hang out with them. The background is this: McFarland, who first rose to notoriety as the proprietor of Magnises, the credit card–meets–social club startup, dreamed up a celebrities-for-rent app called Fyre. It also does a better job pointing out the secret villain of this story all along: the subtle menace of social media marketing. Having seen both, the winner of the contest is clear: It’s Hulu, thanks to its exclusive interviews with Billy McFarland, the dodgy entrepreneur who oversaw the whole fiasco. Hulu dropped its documentary about the ill-fated festival on Monday, gazumping a Netflix documentary on the same subject slated for release on January 18. The disbelieving individual in question is Oren Aks of Jerry Media, the marketing firm that promoted Fyre Festival, the stupidest disaster in the annals of millennial hubris. “Honestly I can’t believe this documentary-there’s two of ‘em.” Against the strains of “Build Me Up Buttercup,” this is how the Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud draws to a close.
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