Envy is one of the seven deadly sins and a rarely used emotional lever in advertising. Which is a shame because when used well it can be highly effective. The question isn't whether your audience is envious. We all are envious of something. It's whether you can identify which direction to point the envy at.
Here are seven tactics from the Storytelling Engine that turn the green-eyed monster into a strategic asset.
- Envy as Camouflage
- Corrupt the Object of Desire
- Make Envy Wearable
- The Envy Inversion
- The Green-Eyed Foil
- Size It Up
- Anti-Envy
1. Envy as Camouflage
Use the seductive surface of an aspirational feed — and hide a harder truth beneath it.
Like My Addiction — Addict Aide, BETC Paris, 2017
The brief: raise awareness that addiction is easy to overlook, even when it's right in front of you. BETC's answer was to create a fictional Instagram account for a woman named Louise Delage — glamorous, well-travelled, perpetually social — and let the platform's envy engine do its work. The account grew thousands of followers before the reveal: every single post contained an alcoholic drink. The campaign reframed social media admiration as a mechanism of complicity — and made the point that addiction hides in plain sight precisely because we're too busy coveting someone's life to look at it clearly.
The #LastSelfie campaign for WWF used Snapchat's disappearing format to post images of endangered animals as if they were casual selfies — the platform's built-in FOMO doing conservation work before the image vanished. When the medium triggers envy, the message travels further.
