What Fyre Did Wrong

View this post on Instagram Are you ready? #FyreFestival A post shared by FYRE FESTIVAL (@fyrefestival) on Jan 3, 2017 at 4:04pm PST

Billy McFarland took much of the flak. It was his concept, and he was in charge of planning. As the documentary footage shows, McFarland never wanted to acknowledge any planning deficiencies. He thought every problem was fixable.

He and his faithful team dispersed false claims about the event and conned people out of monstrous sums of money. Piggybacking on influencers, the Fyre team paid Kendall Jenner a reported $250,000 for a single promotional post about something she had little knowledge about. The marketing team was also naive about FTC compliance—something the FTC has committed to enforcing more strictly.

As a result, the marketers don’t come out of this unscathed. They paid celebrity influencers large sums of money and kept the influencers in the dark about what was actually happening at the festival site.

It did not take long before people began to question McFarland’s claims. Building an inaugural festival with a year’s planning, even in a central location, such as New York or Los Angeles, is near impossible. Creating a festival in a short time on an island in the Bahamas was probably never feasible.

Nonetheless, Billy McFarland kept the festival idea in motion while continually fending off criticism and doubt circulated by his team. He refused to admit his illusions of grandeur. His team, at his behest, continued to spread falsehoods about the event, regularly asking for upgrades and duping people into biting the bait. As a result, McFarland is now serving six years jail.