This Fyre Festival pitch deck is the best thing on the internet today
Instagram kids who were promised a luxury pilgrimage to a remote Caribbean island last week were shocked. Instead of the luxury getaway they expected, accommodations better suited a Hunger Games reenactment.
But investors who poured millions into the Fyre Festival shouldn't have been too surprised.
Vanity Fair just published a copy of the 43-page pitch prospective backers were shown. And it is... something.
Between the absolutely meaningless marketing buzzwords, the liberal peppering of model selfies, and the hilariously grandiose descriptions, the presentation looks like something you might imagine an amalgam of the "Rich kids of Instagram" would prepare for a high school class project.
For starters, the festival organizers — a group led by Ja Rule and businessman Billy McFarland — seem to have trouble expressing what sort of feelings their event will elicit from guests.
"The actual experience exceeds all expectations and is something that is hard to put into words," one slide reads over an ironically prescient photo of a girl holding what looks like an emergency flare.
"It will ignite that type of emotion, that type of power in our guests."
Another slide brags of "reimagining" what it means to attend a music festival.
Having now witnessed the glorious mess that was the Fyre Festival, the only thing that is strictly untrue here is the part about "exceeding" expectations — though expectations were certainly subverted.
The concert-goers who paid upwards of $1,500 to see a show headlined by Blink 182 on a small Bahamian isle were no doubt emotional upon discovering that their "luxury experience" involved meals of plain bread and lettuce, utilitarian tents, water shortages, poor lighting, and questionable security.
Otherwise, the presentation leans heavily on the social media influencers aspect. Instagram joke thief Fuck Jerry, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner are all mentioned as promoters. Selfies of these influencers fill at least a couple of the slides.
Many of those stars pushed the event on social media in the weeks leading up to it without disclosing they were paid to do so -- a violation of Federal Trade Commission rules.
The Fyre brand apparently extends beyond the event itself — the company also operates a talent booking app — and there's some talk of other ventures as well.
One inscrutable page describes a process in which the company buys up "significant portions of land" and uses them to "bring awareness, visitors and livelihood to the land."
Another page is full of breathless media clippings from major news outlets, preemptively deeming the festival "the next BIG destination event," among other things.
"Think Coachella times 1,000 and you're still not even close," raves The Debrief.
Read the full presentation on Vanity Fair.
Patrick Kulp is a Business Reporter at Mashable. Patrick covers digital advertising, online retail and the future of work. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara with a degree in political science and economics, he previously worked at the Pacific Coast Business Times.
