created by companies who want to engage with young people for some sweet sweet traffic. The creators of beautiful Parisian Instagram star Louise Delage wanted users to learn an actual lesson, but it seems to have been lost in the medium.
This whole time, Addict Aide has now revealed, Delage hasn’t been a real person—rather, she’s been a warning about how even sexy, cool, social media users can have a problem. With that knowledge, her posts become a Where’s Waldo of wine glasses:
The video revealing of all Delage’s boozy afternoons strung together has over a thousand comments, with some people explaining that Addict Aide painted the perfect picture of a “functioning alcoholic” and others saying the campaign “seems to imply we should question everyones feed, every mark on their body, ever calorie they consume [sic’d].”
AdWeek reports on how Addict Aide build up their campaign so quickly, and it’s fascinating if you’re considering becoming an Instagram model. Creative director at BETC, the agency that worked on Delage’s account, Stéphane Xiberras explains:
“We rooted our craft into native Instagram content and user habits,” he explains, “building an acquisition strategy around four pillars: content, hashtags, bots and a KOL [key opinion leader] strategy.”
The team posted two to three posts per day at high-traffic moments—in the morning, at lunchtime and late at night, “when people are stalking others.” (Well, now we’re out of the closet.) BETC also studied fashion bloggers, including their attitude and the filters they most commonly use.
To ensure the content was found, each post included a mix of 20-30 hashtags related to fashion, food, nature and parties.
They also set up a “well known bot” to like and follow people who might be interested in Delgade’s constructed brand, and connected with “teenage key opinion leaders” to get them to talk about Delgade and share her profile. Though her followers built up quickly, Xiberras says very few commenters seemed to pick up what they were laying down until the reveal: “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.”
