Storytelling Critique: Louis Delage for Like My Addiction

If you are a non-profit, telling good stories is paramount to success. With the ability to spread empathy and open audiences up to new perspectives, it is perhaps the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. But the best stories, the ones that cut through the clutter, are the ones that highlight aspects of ourselves that we were unaware of. Constructing a good story and telling it in a good way can challenge not just how we see the world, but how we see ourselves.

The first post to @Louise.Delage, August 5th

On August 6, 2016, Louis Delage posted her first photo to instagram. She was a cute young woman, with a fun, bohemian lifestyle - daily postings of her on beaches, in late night exclusive parties, eating delicious meals by the pool. Quickly, she rose from a few hundred followers to a few thousand. Within a month, Louis was a bonafide instagram influencer.

Then, on September 22nd, on her 151st post, Louis Delage revealed that she was not real in a 30 second Instagram video headlined 'Like My Addiciton'.

Louis was an advocacy campaign and social experiment done by the French non-profit Addict Aide, whose primary focus is identifying and reduce alcoholism in French society. Like many French youth, Louis Delage had a secret - she was an alcoholic. But what was most powerful about the campaign was actually rooted in the user experience with it: in each of Louis' 150 posts, she was drinking or holding alcohol. The signs were there, but not one of her thousands of followers had seen them.

'Cocooning' - September 18th

'💦 Pool 💦' - August 12th

What was so effective about this campaign is how they used the medium to boost their message. It fit itself perfectly into the cadence of modern social organizing to insert a counter-narrative through the very channel that perpetuates the dominant narrative. Actionable behavioral was obvious in that the population had acted on default in engaging with the media and was made salient to the dangers of these defaults simultaneously, making actionable opportunities for behavior change much more adoptable by the segment. Instead of telling, Like My Addiction showed the issue, causes, and solution through user engagement and phenomenal storytelling.

Addict Aide's message, that it is difficult to identify addiction and even more difficult to challenge it in your relationships, played perfectly. As a result of this ad, Addict Aide saw huge boosts in awareness. But more significantly, they planted the seeds for change in their audiences heads - supplying the tools to work towards solutions beyond cyberspace and into the real world.