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Fyre Festival: How It Should Have Gone Down

Jonathan Emmins takes us through how bottles of mouthwash on their desks whilst Fyre Festival should have gone down, muttering something about having ‘a can with comments originally featured as part do’ attitude… of Access All Areas cover feature on As with many in the event industry, this was 4th March 2019. the second time it captured our imagination When released their amazing Fyre – and when I say ‘imagination’ I mean Festival car-crash documentary in the New ‘sweaty nightmares’. The first time was Year there was feverish messaging between back in 2017, when we watched the Fyre the Amplify masses. As a nod to the hype build in real-time via social channels, documentary, the Live Team returned from after which the bubble burst as debris and their well earned breaks to find our Head accusations flew in all directions. of Production, Richie, had left individual Beyond Billy McFarland’s elaborate con-trick x

so much was wrong with the organisation the producers and live team to make of Fyre Festival that any attempt to write the vision a reality. and share learnings feels like a lesson in Analysing Fyre, there wasn’t an experienced event organising 101, just on an epic scale. event leadership team at the helm, nor was So, here’s a few eggs to suck on… there support in place to do due diligence An Insight + a Vision and bring specialist expertise to the party. In fact, it seemed that Andy King was No matter the dodgy motives and how given the gig due to producing some wine badly expectations were mismanaged, tastings for Billy McFarland’s previous there was a true vision in there somewhere. enterprise. The fact is that anyone else with Billy, his cheerleader , and the right experience or who spoke sense the agencies he brought on board had either walked away, was ignored, or exited. an insight, intuitively knew an audience, and put spend behind to exploit that. Full Scoping Most festivals fail to break even in the first couple of years, but the hype behind Fyre There was a vision but not a firm plan. captured the spirit of the target audience’s Too much was happening on the fly imagination and according to various leaving the organisers exposed and easily accounts 5,000 tickets sold out in no-time leveraged. Yet they still refused to take as demand for accommodation quickly control by delaying the event, despite outstripped availability. The marketing had numerous recommendations from those worked, but at what cost? with more experience.

The Right Team + Experience Loose lips and an un-contracted venue put the guys in a tailspin, but beyond that One of Amplify’s core beliefs is the ‘idea no-one had done the basics; a thorough is only as good as the execution’. Don’t sell scope, line budget, and timelines. Instead a dream you can’t deliver. We’re an agency one of the organisers is reported to have built on creativity and big ideas but with this said “Let’s just do it and be legends, man”. we have a responsibility to manage They weren’t wrong. Just ‘legendary’ for the expectations of our clients and those the wrong reasons. of their target audiences (and, it goes without saying, their safety). Budget Management

To do this you need to put the right team Events are expensive and margins in place, the right mix of experience, are often tight in an industry with huge the right level of experience, clear third-party costs. Some of the most leadership, and a chain of command pre, successful events only hit profit when during, and post event. The creatives and they reach 80% capacity – and that’s when strategists work hand in hand with they’ve budgeted correctly. x

By launching without a full scope, more questioning. the team might have been more aware If it’s too good to be true, it usually is. of an $8m shortfall, from the $4m estimate Safety to the $12m+ reality. We often talk about ‘budget versus ambition’. Creative-wise, It’s the less sexy end of events but there we think laterally and pragmatically to find seemed to be scant regard for health and ways to crack briefs with maximum impact safety, risk assessments, security, crowd flow, and cost efficiency. But to deliver a $12m+ fire assessment, and so on, which should event on $4m would need Harry Potter underpin everything. We should be grateful on the team. that more people weren’t hurt or there weren’t greater catastrophes beyond thefts It’s a false economy to undervalue and petty crime when the event turned from expertise. You need to match the team festival into an immersive re-enactment to the complexity of the task, especially of ‘Lord of the Flies’ for rich kids. The bad when you’re pioneering new terrain and weather immediately before the festival a new site. Doing a ‘first’ is exciting, but it certainly exacerbated conditions, but usually is significantly harder organisationally and would have been covered by a contingency the allocation for infrastructure is usually plan and / or if the accommodation had inherently higher. We know that expertise been as sold rather than refugee tents. comes at a price whether it’s the team internally, freelancers or specialists we Wrap bring in. They deserve to be paid Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Ambulances’ appropriately for the value they’re bringing, muses on how when we hear the siren their experience, their relationships, of an ambulance we can’t think of others and the cost-effectiveness of the speed mortality without thinking of our own. they get from A to B. Maybe Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary Whilst Fyre may have paid a little more is the event organisers’ ‘Ambulances’. for experienced event organisers, it would We can’t help watching without breaking have saved them millions in the long run into a sweat by thinking of what would (still not enough to keep the dream afloat, happen if we ever ignored the basics but millions none the less). How do you of event management and found ourselves know the true cost of a stage if you’ve in that position. We should never be booked it through ? complacent but, thankfully, as an industry And even the 20-something talent booker we aspire to be – and are – better than Fyre. was fully aware he was paying twice as much as market rates for talent, but his lack For more info contact of experience, reputation, and a looming Tosh Ohta | Head of Client Development [email protected] deadline meant the agents had a field day. +44 (0) 7977908152 | +44 (0) 20 7382 6222 Maybe the agents too should have been weareamplify.com