Do you know Louis Delage is not a real person?

So what? (and it is Louise – not Louis)

Ad agencies are in the business of manipulating people. This particular one caught on.

Look, @imrainmaker – people are generally stupid. Give them a story line and a pretty face, and they will follow anything.

The real question is one of effectiveness – did this campaign actually stop a single person from alcohol addiction? If so, then it was successful. If not, it was just another ad.

What’s Instagram? just kidding, but only a little

Smokey the Bear isn’t real either, but we all know it’s up to us to prevent forest fires.

Irrespective of whether the campaign has been successful or not it was a good use of social media which was encouraging. The concept looked good.

Several years ago my company started a “fake profile” account (and well publicized that it was fake; there was nothing at all hidden or shady about it) as part of an effort to be more “customer focused”. So the company made up posters for this person – he’s kind of a thin, grim-looking older-middle-aged white guy in a dark suit, white shirt and gray tie who was supposed to be the CEO of his own eponymous energy company (so yeah, they went ahead and made up a fictional company to go along with the fictional person) and hung them around the offices with the kinds of “customer feedback” that we could sometimes get. Once in a while the poster would show him smiling about something that he liked about our company’s products and performance, but more often than not he looked like the school principal from all of your worst childhood nightmares of being called into the office, and some kind of negative reaction to various quality or delivery issues that we’ve had from time to time.

At first this was all “inside the company”, but on a whim one day I checked to find that … he has a Facebook page as well. (Even a LinkedIn profile, too, I think, but … sheesh, who goes there, anyway?)

So I sent him a friend request, which was promptly accepted. The campaign never really took off, though, as we haven’t heard from him in quite some time now … but he does have six Facebook friends (two of them were at my suggestion – and one of them, since retired, had made a comment on his wall that I hadn’t even known about three years ago).

So … yeah, it’s a thing. It’s not a new thing. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

If you want to make a new friend, I could suggest Adam Kentro to anyone who’s interested in building up their list of contacts.