What's Next for Louise Delage, Instagram's Most Fascinating Fraud

The campaign has already won 17 Lions in two days at Cannes

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CANNES, France—Last summer, for an organization called Addict Aide, Paris agency BETC invented a character named Louise Delage.

The fictional woman appeared on Instagram and cleaned up on followers in a handful of weeks. (She still has over 110,000 as of this writing.) Her life was glamorous and beautiful, and people ate it up.

But a little over a month after her Instagram debut, a video appeared on her account that revealed the truth. Louise’s entire Insta universe was actually a campaign about alcohol addiction.

If her success marked and polarized us, it’s for many reasons.

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