Sales in Fyre documentary

Billy McFarland was a entrepreneur and very good salesman. There is a documentary on Netflix about the scam “Fyre Festival” that he orchestrated. The Fyre festival was intended to be a exclusive music festival on a private island in the Bahamas. McFarland used famous celebrities and models in order to sell the festival. This was at a time when Instagram was at a peak and he utilized social media very well. The concept of the festival was that people would be able to party with famous people. McFarland was selling ticket packages for thousands of dollars, but his selling point was status. The appeal to people was that if they could go to Fyre festival they would look good to others and be able to be part of something exclusive. McFarland knew people and how to appeal to them, however he was inexperienced and did not have enough time to make his plan a reality. He paid celebrities tens of thousands of dollars to post advertisements about the festival. Ex. “So hype for the #Fyrefestival”. Upon arrival at the festival the attendees were excited to see everything they saw on social media. The problem was that there was no festival, and all of the acts had canceled or never committed to showing up. McFarland quickly scrambled and had busses shuttle people to an outdoor bar. People soon demanded that they be taken to the festival sight so they could get to their assigned tents and get settled in. Once the busses went to the festival sight, everyone saw that they would be staying in hurricane pop up tents. A post on twitter quickly went viral of a cheese sandwich in a Styrofoam box. It is ironic that McFarland’s rise and fall were both through social media. The issue with this sales story is not that McFarland was not good at sales, he was very good. The issue is that he lacked transparency, and his ego was too big to cancel the festival all together.