If you’ve gone to Blake Lively’s Instagram page lately, you may have noticed that things are a little, um, sparse. No more photos of Ryan Reynolds. No more glam outfit posts. Only one Instagram post remains, and there’s a pretty genius reason why.
That lone post is a trailer for Lively’s new movie The Rhythm Section. Why? Lively tends to do this mass purge when she starts promoting a new project, as multiple outlets have noted. Given that The Rhythm Section hits theatres in January, the time to start promoting it would be now.
Lively did the same thing last year when she started promoting A Simple Favor, causing fans to wonder if something was amiss about her relationship with Reynolds (not to worry, things are probably fine!). It didn’t help that she also unfollowed him around this same time. She isn’t the only celeb to do this, either.
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Taylor Swift pulled a similar stunt back in 2017 when she wiped her feed before posting cryptic gifs of snakes and teasing her then-new album, reputation. Miley Cyrus did the same thing in 2018, as did Lorde when she needed a clean slate.
You might be thinking, All this for a movie or album? But consider this: fans hear that all Lively’s photos are down and immediately flock to her Instagram. When they arrive they watch the trailer and voila, a bunch of video views. They speculate about what’s happening and before you know it, Lively’s trending on Twitter. Not to mention the media coverage. It’s a savvy marketing tactic, we must admit.
Now, successfully pulling this off takes some serious dedication. So, props to her. Just think of all the good selfies and birthday tributes Lively had to nix in order to make this promo happen.
Although, if she was smart, like we know she is since she’s doing this in the first place, she just archived the old photos, and hopefully we’ll see them again someday.