Playing With Fyre: What The Fyre Festival Fiasco Can Teach Us About PR

You’ve probably seen the recent media explosion about Fyre Festival. If you haven’t, a luxury music festival was planned on an uninhabited island in the Bahamas for the super wealthy, with tickets being sold for as much as twelve thousand dollars. Some reportedly sold for much more than that, so for that much money you would expect the trip of a lifetime.
 
It wasn’t.

When the excited festival-goers arrived on the island (many stepping off private jets), they found simple tents, cold sandwiches, and a thorough lack of water and utilities.
The festival had paid hundreds of social media stars, Instagram models, and big Celebrity names to promote it on their social media. Ironically, they used these same platforms to tell the world how terrible everything was when they arrived. And with some of these names having literally millions of people read their posts, pretty soon it blew up into a media uproar, with people polarized between concern for their celebrity idols, and others gleefully relishing spoilt rich kids getting their comeuppance.
Belongings were stolen, tents burned down, and the entire event was haunted by a pack of roaming feral dogs. No, really.
Eventually everyone was shipped off the island, before it had the chance to fully descend into a Battle Royale/Mad Max/Jurassic Park style fight for survival. Sadly. 
Of course, people on social media ripped the festival to shreds:

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