Like My Addiction

Background

Addict Aide was an online platform designed to help addicts and the people closest to them with a number of useful tools.

They believed that addictions accounted for one in five deaths every year in France and one in every two criminal acts, especially among young people.

Idea

To raise awareness of both Addict Aide and the fact that addictions are often unremarked, the idea was to set up a fictional Instagram account for a party-loving 25 year-old called Louise Delage.

Over a two-month period Louise posted 149 photographs of herself sipping cocktails on yachts, lounging by swimming pools, partying and drinking champagne in a bubble bath.

Young and glamorous, Delage gathered nearly 12,000 followers and many thousands of likes on the platform before her last post.

This was a video in which she confessed that there was more to her account than meets the eye. Every single image had included an alcoholic drink. The point she made was most people know someone whose addiction is hidden in plain sight.

Results

Aiming to raise awareness among young people of how easy it was to miss the addiction of someone close, the 'reveal' film created great buzz in the media.

Before the reveal Louise had 7,500 followers on Instagram and 50,000 likes.

After the reveal, traffic to addict-aide.com increased 500%.

It became a trending topic on Twitter in France and generated some 140 PR stories.

The number of people following Louise doubled to 16,000.

She got an additional 20,000 likes.

In total, the video got over 500,000 views (on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook) with no media spend at all.

Our Thoughts

One of the hardest things for marketers to wrap their heads around in this new digital age of ours is the concept of test and iterate.

Rather than plan for months an elaborate campaign that is integrated across multiple media, just do something. Anything.

Just start with a tweet. Or an Instagram post.

In this instance, it was quite possible that Louise Delage would get only a handful of followers. So the idea is a triumph of optimism over experience. There were no guarantees Louise would attract enough followers for the big 'reveal' to get talked about. But she did. And that's what made the story so interesting. Not just the simple human truth that addicts are often invisible but the simple human truth that society's attitudes towards alcohol make us all complicit in the problem.