Ja Rule talks with Forbes Chief Content Officer Randall Lane at the annual Forbes CMO Summit this ... [+]
The rapper, actor, and entrepreneur Ja Rule is no stranger to the importance of branding. However, since he became associated with the Fyre Festival fiasco in 2017, he’s also been thinking about marketing—both what it should be and what it isn’t.
Speaking at the annual Forbes CMO Summit this week at the Ritz Carlton in Dana Point, California, Ja Rule recounted his experience leading up to the disastrous festival on an island in the Bahamas that has become the subject of lawsuits and multiple documentaries. While denying knowing that the event might lead to fraudulent practices, he said the fear of missing out—or “FOMO”—drove the marketing strategy. (During the inaugural weekend–which was supposed to include major music acts like Blink 182 and Major Lazer–Fyre Festival faced issues around shortages of food, security, shelter and other issues that ultimately led to its cancelation and evacuation.)
“The thing about marketing,” he said. “What’s the best marketing thing that’s out there that’s being sold right now in the eyes of everybody right now? I’m going to say faith and hope. And that’s what the pastor says. It doesn’t exist. It’s what you believe in. This are the original marketing tools. I’m going to sell you something that doesn’t exist: hope. I’m going to sell you faith. And when it doesn’t happen, what does the pastor say? ‘Have more faith.’”
While experiential marketing has become integral to a lot of brands over the past few years, nothing has compared to the empty promises of Fyre Festival. Ja Rule said promoting the event through videos and influencers helped to build “mystery.”
“I wanted the experience to be such an amazing experience that you wouldn’t care who’s going to perform,” he said. “You wanted to be on that beach at that festival regardless, running with the pigs, with jet skis, with models. That was the whole thing. Let’s create the mystique.”
The mystique led some festival-goers to pay more than $10,000 for something that never happened. In the lead-up, celebrities and models including Bella Hadid and Hailey Baldwin promoted the event on social media, but it ended up becoming a disaster that left many people stranded. (In an apology Ja Rule posted on Twitter as the event unraveled, he said he was “heartbroken” annd claimed it wasn’t meant to be a scam.)
It’s now been a year since Fyre Festival organizer Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to fraud. And while the festival was two years ago, the legal issues still remain. Just last week, Law360 reported that a New York federal judge ruled that ticket holders who want to litigate $100 million in fraud claims against Ja Rule and Fyre Festival CMO Grant Margolin might be futile.
“He understood that kids like him wanted so bad to be a part of that ‘A Crowd,’ that in-crowd,” Ja Rule said of McFarland. “To be cool, to be wanted and to be accepted into that crowd. this whole thing was built on that, and that was the marketing strategy for the whole thing. It was built for kids just like who who wanted the experience more than anything.”
According to Ja Rule, McFarland was “not not smart when it came to marketing,” adding that people described McFarland to him as a “great entrepreneur” and a “child prodigy.”
“There were so many smart people that invested in Billy,” he said. “Who am I to say that they were wrong? I had no inclination that he was a bad guy.”
Manipulating people who wanted to be close to the music, the models and the luxurious life was part of the appeal from the start. In the 2019 Netflix documentary, Fyre, Ja Rule and others can be seen around a campfire, coaxing models to jump into a pool talking about the plan for Fyre Festival.
“We’re selling a pipe dream to your average loser,” McFarland says. “Your average guy in Middle America.”
Ja Rule, interrupting McFarland, echoes him: “Selling a pipe dream to f––king buyers,” to which McFarland adds “your average guy in middle America.”
Fyre Festival taught Ja Rule a “valuable lesson,” he said, explaining that he’s “scared to death now” when it comes to branded partnerships, and “just very very cautious about what I do.”
“It hurt me the most because I think my name was the name on the marquee,” he said. “I was the name people knew, and I was the one who took the most shots for it. When it all went down, I’m not the only who is going to jail because I didn’t do anything illegal, but if this would have gone off without a hitch everybody would have said, ‘Wow look at this great thing Billy did.’ But when it blew up, ‘Look what f--king Ja Rule did.’ This is how this whole thing went.”
That’s not keeping him from staying on the sidelines. Speaking on stage with Forbes at the Ritz, Ja Rule also talked about launching his own talent-booking app called Iconn—which is in some ways similar to the app that Fyre Fest was meant to promote in the first place. He also said he hasn’t ruled out following through with the music festival in a different form and mentioned that reputable partners in the music festival space have already contacted him about making it a reality.
“This is the biggest festival in the world that never happened,” he said. “We’re laughing, but there’s so much value in the thing that this thing is that big. It’s a global phenomenon.”
Ja Rule also talked about the role that influencer marketing played in promoting the festival. For example, he said that having 800,000 followers on Instagram doesn’t always translate to sales. However, he said partnering with models like Kendall Jenner immediately had impact.
Those influencers weren’t cheap, either. According to The Verge, the festival’s organizers paid model Kendal Jenner $250,000 for a single post on Instagram.
“I kid you not, when that (post) went out, ticket sales flew,” he said. “Because those girls have a different engagement when it comes to Instagram. Those people that follow them are there because they are looking to hear the new cool thing, to be told what’s happening, what’s cool because they’re the taste-makers. They’re the only ones that have that case on Instagram.”
