Anastasia Ashley Involved in Fyre Festival Fiasco | Are social media influencers on their death bed?
If you haven’t been following the Fyre Festival debacle you’re missing out on some serious deep belly lol’s. At the heart of the matter though is how shitty social media influencers are. One of the many ‘Fyre starters’ involved in the outrageous scam is none other than surfer/influencer/twerker Anastasia Ashley.
Check into it over on Vanity Fair.
Sample:
“But there is one area where advertisers are clearly winning: so-called “influencers” on social media. Those are the people who, at least on Instagram, don’t have or need a job and yet seem to live in a constant state of happiness, seemingly walking around in bikinis at a pool or beach all day, and hanging out with one of the Kardashians enjoying free bottle service at the club all night. These people have essentially become walking integrated-marketing campaigns. For McFarland and Ja Rule, they were called, aptly enough, “Fyre Starters.”
As the investor deck notes, and one person who was pitched by the organizers told me, the Fyre Squad (yes, I just wrote that) had recruited over 400 Fyre Starters (ugh) with mass followings on social media (mostly Instagram and Twitter) to share promotional videos and photos of the Fyre Festival and say how excited they were to attend. In exchange, the Fyre Starters, which included names like Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, and Nick Bateman, were offered free flights, accommodations, and tickets to the event, which ranged in price from $1,500 to $12,500 for people who were not Fyre Starters (some ticket packages surpassed $100,000). Some of the more influential influencers (a little part of me dies inside every time I type that word) require being paid for these kinds of promotions, too.
As the pitch deck claims, within the first 48 hours of the social-media blitz, the Fyre Starters had reached “300 million social impressions”—impressions being the kind of dumb synonym one uses instead of the word “people,” in the same way someone at a bar tries to sound smart by saying he is “inebriated” instead of “drunk.” (And to be fair, an impression isn’t even a sentient person. It’s essentially reaching a person when they aren’t paying attention.) To pull off the 300 million impressions, McFarland and Ja Rule partnered with a P.R. agency, a creative agency, and Elliot Tebele, a once-random nobody who has created a social-media empire by siphoning other people’s jokes into the Instagram account @FuckJerry.
One of the biggest deceits of the entire media campaign was that almost all of the 400 influencers who shared the promotional videos and photos never noted they were actually advertising something for someone else, which the Federal Trade Commission requires. This kind of advertising has been going on for years, and while the F.T.C. has threatened to crack down on online celebrities and influencers deceitfully failing to disclose that they are paid to post sponsorships, so far those threats have been completely ignored.
Back in December, the Fyre Starters were enticing people to talk about the upcoming festival as the “biggest FOMO-inducing event of 2017.” As Fashionista noted, the models were arriving by private plane to the island, lounging on the beach and yachts, and gleefully promoting the event. Yet a few hours after the actual festival began, those same Fyre Starters who scammed all of their followers into buying tickets, quickly started deleting their promotional posts (that were never labeled as promotional). The few people who didn’t remove them, or seemingly forgot, were inundated with messages from fans telling them to delete the posts. Either way, almost all of the influencers in the pitch deck are back to their selfishly influencing selves, taking selfies in bikinis on a beach or by a pool, completely ignoring what actually happened. Jenner, Ratajkowski, and Bateman haven’t issued an apology to their fans.”
Click over to VANITY FAIR for more on Anatasia Ashley and other social media influencers role in the Fyre Festival scam.
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