Let's look at the hard numbers
(***Update from June 9 under cut***)
There are so many questions swirling about this stunt: Why now? Why her? Is it to level up his profile for the release of LT3? Is it to promote her projects? Is it for Soccer Aid promo? Is it to help promote Louisâ sistersâ projects (the new make-up line for Lottie and a possible reality show for the twins)? Arenât people more wise today to how fake this type of celebrity promotional âstrategyâ is?
People who are smarter than me and have been around this fandom a lot longer than me have put out some good suggestions as to why this type of stunt is still happening in 2025.
I thought it would be helpful to examine some of the metrics surrounding the stunt and I think I will start with Zara. Letâs see if from my (somewhat limited) visibility of her online metrics, this stunt has helped her and the visibility of her brands. Just to be clear, these are social listening numbers only. These charts include mentions on social accounts like X, Tumblr, Reddit,etc, but exclude tabloid articles or TikTok. BUT it would include any posting and sharing of the tabloid articles and their sentiment on social.
So when this stunt âofficiallyâ launched - March 2025, this is what Zaraâs daily mentions looked like across social channels. She had a total of 3.7K mentions in the month between Feb 1 and March 3. An average of about 125 mentions per day.Â
You can see that on March 1, she had a huge spike - around 525 mentions - because this was the day that Louis liked her post of her in a white dress.
One of the smaller spikes in that chart on Feb 19/20 was the day that Louis followed Zara on IG.Â
There are a couple of other smaller spikes between those two dates that correspond with some tabloid articles about why she and Sam broke up that were talked about on social. (They needed to make sure everyone knew the break up was official before the big reveal/follow.)
One other thing to note: As we can see on this screen grab on the day that Louis followed her, she had approximately 2M followers.Â
Letâs examine how her numbers are faring now, 1 public dinner, 1 kiss (I guess thatâs what you could call it?) in the driveway of a rental house in Malibu, 1 romantic trip to Tesco on Easter Sunday, and 1 trip to hang out with the lad crew in Costa Rica.
Here are her social mention stats as of today:
As you can see, she is still sitting at the 3.7K mentions in a monthâs time frame, the spikes are just distributed differently. She had a spike on April 23 - the romantic date to Tesco, then the spike in early May for the âkiss heard round the worldâ and then this weekendâs Costa Rica public outing. But, people, all this work and she hasnât even broken 600 mentions in a day. This includes her non-Louis content like when she talks about her clothing brand, when she promotes different products, her documentaries, her work as an ambassador, etc.Â
Also, her follower count hasnât increased in any significant way. As of today, she is still at 2M followers. Itâs safe to say this stunt has done nothing to level up her profile in the last couple of months.Â
I wanted to add one more bit of info. Below is her sentiment chart for the last 30 days. Sentiment measures what the corresponding emotions are tracking at for the social mentions.
In this chart there are three lines. The gray neutral line shows social mentions that just talk about what happened but doesnât give any opinion or emotion with it. This would be when a tabloid posts on social about the event or promotes their article about it. These are just records of what happened. The green and red lines chart when different social accounts talk about the event on their channels - X, Tumblr, etc. - and then express their opinion about it, good or bad.Â
When her mentions spiked in early May for the pap pictures of the kiss, we saw some positive sentiment along with a high spike of negativity. This past weekend, however, when her mentions spiked due to the fan coverage of their Costa Rica appearance, the positive sentiment didnât spike but the negative sentiment was even higher.Â
This indicates that people are more negative about this recent appearance than they were about the past sightings. So negativity about her and the ârelationshipâ (stunt) is increasing. If I had to guess, I would say I donât think she has a team like Louis has a team. I think she probably has an agent advising her and maybe some PR/marketing help, but she is probably managing this on a day to day basis on her own for the most part. But she, or whoever is looking at this for her, should pay very close attention. This is not a good trend.
If she were my client, my advice would be to quit while youâre ahead. Go under the radar for a while because this negative trend could only get worse and it will negatively affect your brand.Â
These numbers are very clear but no one really knows what will happen next. Louis and his team are betting his reputation and future album and tour success on this promotion campaign, but have no real idea where public sentiment will go from here. But, itâs not looking good. Next I will look at his numbers.Â
What are your thoughts about it?
