Louise Delage and her overnight Instagram success revealed
- Nguyễn Lê Hồng Phúc
- Sep 30, 2016
- 4 min read
Updated: May 6, 2022
We all know a girl like Louise. On Instagram battle field, you are scrapping for 50 likes and call it a day. Then she appears on your perfect feed, with her dazzling life and cultivates over 16k people within the course of 2 months.
Who was she really? And how come all of this fame over the summer time? Well, nobody cares about that. All they knew was that she had a perfect dream life all the girls crave for, parties day and night, white yak on every vacation, always seemed to be carpe diem, live life to the fullest.. We all learned to be wary of such an overnight success like this one. But with glamorous instagram look that only covered photogenic aspect of your everyday life, time and assumptions blunted our critical knives. The comments on her photos were praises and curiosity about an out-going, active girl enjoy her life. Don’t we all wish to stumble upon such a luxury?
Louise's Instagram account with 17k followers within 2 months
To make it clear, on August 1st, Louise made very first photo on Instagram, fun, lively, cheerful life of her. We all thought she was just another Parisian fashionable chic enjoying her social circle of friends. Every photo depicted Louise in trendy clothes, sun-soaked smile and confident eye contact with the camera. We thought that was all about Louise!
No! We were all wrong!
It turned out that this social star with 50.000 likes was in fact a character built up by creative agency BETC for a campaign in France called “Like my addiction”.
Did you notice something unusual in most of her photos? She was always holding a glass of wine, a drink, secretively or obviously. And they all appeared somewhere in her photos, leaving some of us unnoticed. She was a drunk, an alcoholic!
The truth was revealed last week when a video was uploaded on her Instagram page which pointed out the odds about Louise and her drinking problem. And it closed with the final line “It’s easy to miss the addiction of someone close”. The video received more than 60k views and 600 engagements.
BETC, the agency behind this hoax wanted to raise awareness of alcoholism among Parisian young people. According to the client company, Addict Aide, “out of every fives deaths of young people annual, one is from addiction”. Therefore Addict Aide sought for solutions targeting at youth and their friends who are worried about their alcohol consumption, or that of someone close to them.
The creative director of BETC explained “We thought an interesting way of showing it would be to create a personal people would meet every day but whom we’d never suspect of being an addict, by setting up a fake Instagram account.” This strategy is regarded very clever and insightful.
So one question left, how did they fool people?
To gain such impressive followers for our character live in short lifespan, they rooted the strategy based on four pillars: content, hashtags, bots and KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). The post would be updated twice or three times a day at high traffic moments - in the morning, at lunchtime and late at night. The team also surveyed popular “grammers” to learn their favourite filters, styles of caption they commonly use and what kind of life people want to see most.
For every post, at least 10 hashtags are used including latest trends from fashion, food, travel, beauty, party, etc. to ensure maximum exposure. They also use Instagram Bot (a robotic files that automatically research for similar post/hashtag account quality and like specific instagram accounts) to follow some trendsetters in the field. This shows a significant improvement:
Louise is following only 3,156 highly-selected people, compared to 16,7k followers on her account.
Finally, with the KOL strategy, they use popular instagram account, with between 20k to 100k followers to talk about Louise and spread her profile. Very clever approach and genuine solution. However, to some future skeptical journalists, her little secret already exposed after few weeks straight.
The final result
The video was a turn-of-the-game kind of move, within few hours after the video launch, the page exposure skyrocketed and generated articles sprang up to 150 and became a trending topic in France on Twitter. The video won over 500k views from all social media channels like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and posts by supporting KOLs. Surprisingly, there was zero spend on the media cost.
The creative director had hoped Louise to perform better and attract more followers to Louise’s page and create more influence. To those struggling with their drinking disorder or know someone potentially experiencing alcoholism, this campaign serves as a wake-up call, so they can act upon and contact Addict Aide for further supports. “It is seemed like in this era, the more people stage their ideal life on social media, the more that serves to hide their no-so-perfect reality”. And that’s how you spot your friends with suspicious problem that you can help!
Source: Adweek
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