You see them all over Instagram: happy young #fitgirls. They have a large follower base and over 100 likes on average on each photo they post. In the summer of 2016 another one of these girls started posting on Instagram under the name Louise Delage. Louise is a 25 years old Parisienne. She posts photos of her jet set life: fancy holidays, parties and food. She seems like a happy and healthy girl enjoying her life without any worries. She has more than 12K followers and over 50K likes.
But who is this girl? How did she get so popular in such a short amount of time? The truth behind this account is campaign from a French organisation Addict Aide: Like my addiction. The campaign was launched to raise awareness of alcohol addiction among young people. Together with an agency Addict Aide created Louise. They did research on how to create a popular profile on Instagram, and defined a strategy for the account in terms of hashtags, time of posting and content.
Thousands of people started liking Louise. Her photos had one thing in common: she is having an alcoholic drink on almost every photo. There were a few people who noticed this, and the organisation had hoped a lot of people would. However, the majority of Instagrammers did not see it. They saw a happy young girl and by liking her photos they were actually liking her alcohol addiction without even knowing it. The key message of the campaign is that every one knows a Louise Delage. It can be very hard to spot the addiction of someone very close to you. Moreover, with social media these days people can cover up a lot of things. The people who look overly happy online are often very unhappy in real life.
The clever thing about this campaign is that when they revealed the truth about Louise, she became even more popular. The story went viral in France and was covered in a lot of media. The French version of the video has been viewed over 200.000 times.
In my opinion, Addict Aide has done an amazing job with this campaign. They used the power of social media and its network effects to raise awareness among thousands of people without any media budget. I have not seen the Instagram account before they revealed the truth. Now it is obvious because you know it is there, but I wonder if I would have noticed before I knew the truth.
Sources:
http://www.addictaide.fr/actualite/like-my-addiction-notre-nouvelle-campagne-pour-sensibiliser-aux-consommations-excessives-dalcool/
http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/who-louise-delage-troubling-truth-behind-overnight-instagram-success-173792
http://creativity-online.com/work/addict-aide-like-my-addiction/49179
Dear Orla, thank you for your post! I had not heard of this campaign before, and I think it is a very smart campaign. It also shows that while we see things, we may not register them, or think they are normal (such as Louise having a drink in her hand on each picture). Maybe people did not notice, as people tend to make their life look more glamorous on Instagram (i.e., maybe she was just holding the drink to look ‘cool’ on the picture). I think it is very important for people, especially the generation currently growing up with social media, that often times these accounts only show the ‘good’ or ‘glamorous’ side of someone, and are therefore not a true representation of how a person really feels. I hope there will be more campaigns like this to raise awareness!