#TGIM: How a brand created a fake influencer for social good

(Marketingmagazine.com.my) – By: Malati Siniah

On her Instagram grid Louise Delage, a 25-year-old Parisian, lives an exciting life of wild parties and exotic vacations. Having posted her first photo on August 1st this year, in less than two months she built a following of over 90,000 followers.

While hundreds constantly ‘like’ Louise’s pictures, many fail to notice a common feature in almost every one of her snapshots.

Alcohol….

On September 22th Louise revealed that the life portrayed on her Instagram profile was fake and the whole thing was part of a campaign titled “Like my addiction” by French organisation Addict Aide and advertising agency BETC.

The video highlighted the various pictures posted by Louise in the past months and focused on the one thing many of her followers failed to notice, the alcoholic drinks she consumed in every picture.

The campaign was done to raise awareness of alcohol addiction among young people. Sharing more on the campaign BETC Paris president and creative director Stéphane Xiberras told Adweek, “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,”

Stéphane told Adweek that in creating Louise’s persona his team studied top fashion bloggers and used similar filters and picture poses commonly used by them.

As part of building Louise’s Instagram profile the agency shared that they had:

• Included at least 20 fashion or food related hashtags in each post
• Created a bot to like and follow people interested in fashion and celebrities.
• Used popular KOL or Key Opinion Leaders with over 20,000 to 100,000 followers, to share Louise’s profile among their followers.

As a result of Louise’s big reveal, Addict Aide saw five times more traffic on their website and the video revealing the campaign racked over 233,000 views on Instagram and close to 760,000 views on YouTube.