Just like every internet-savvy woman, 25-year-old Louise Delage of France loves to take snaps of everything and anything under the sun. She hangs out with her friends, eats in fancy restaurants and loves to travel.
She joined the social media site on Aug. 1, and with solely 150 snaps of her posing with an alcoholic beverage in hand, she speedily intrigued 90,500 followers.
Regardless of her social media stardom, Delage posted her 150th and final snap on Instagram on Sept. 22—a short clip created by advertising agency BETC in relation to its “Like My Addiction” campaign. It turned out that the seductive and attractive lady was, in fact, used as a marketing strategy for Addict Aide, an organization igniting awareness campaigns about alcohol addiction among youths.
For the whole time, Delage’s posh photos featured a vast library of booze and beer. Although she is donned in stylish outfits in exquisite places, her account reminds social media users that even online celebrities can have addiction problems.
BETC president Stéphane Xiberras told AdWeek: “We were briefed on the difficulty of detecting the addiction of someone close to you—a friend, a child or a parent.”
“We thought an interesting way of showing it would be to create a person people would meet every day but whom we’d never suspect of being an addict, by setting up a fake Instagram account,” he added.
To make her identity viral, the campaign team posted Delage’s snaps during the “rush hours” of social media traffic—in the morning, lunchtime and late at night. The advertising agency researched Instagram habits of prominent fashion bloggers and used 20-30 food, fashion and travel hashtags for Delage’s posts. As part of its strategy, a person was assigned to follow important Instagram accounts on Delage’s account while tapping on teenagers to “spread” Delage’s profile among their followers.
The campaign may be successful, but they felt baffled with the result that only a portion of her Instagram followers observed her vexing addiction.
Xiberras said, “We hoped for more followers to take notice of Louise’s behavior. There were a few people who sensed the trap—a journalist among others, of course—but in the end, the majority just saw a pretty young girl of her time and not at all a kind of lonely girl, who is actually not at all that happy and with a serious alcohol problem.” Delage became famous on social media again, this time as a trending topic among French Twitter users these past few days.
The video clip amassed 232,000 views on Instagram and 755,000 views on YouTube as of this writing. Gianna Francesca Catolico