Regina Konstantinova — Just recently, Boris Bork, a good-looking money-bags appeared seemingly from nowhere and suddenly became hugely popular amongst Russian Instagram users. "I am 65. I live in Moscow. And I want to teach you how to live," reads the description of the man's page which has over 16 thousand followers.
It turned out that the successful rich man on these photos is actually a typical pensioner who was renting a flat and living off his retirement benefit. How was it that he managed to take the Internet by storm?
Roman Zaripov, a 23-year-old marketing expert from Russian advertising agency Nectarin, was the man behind this transformation. In March 2016, he came across an article describing the creation of an Internet star and revealing the astronomical amount of money it needs.
Roman took this as a challenge:
"Fueled by my own interest, I wished to do something exceptional and supercool, both to have some fun and to prove that great things can be done even without a huge budget," he told Sputnik. "In addition, this was a good opportunity to try new channels for marketing."
With the help of his friend Mikhail, Roman quickly scrapped together an image of an elderly man who is sporty, loves pretty young ladies and has a sharp tongue. Then they searched through social media and found someone who was perfect for the role.
"Boris was in excellent shape. He was good-looking and young at heart. This man was hiding a little badass inside himself. Therefore, there was no doubt that he is a perfect candidate," the marketing expert explained.
"It was also very essential that the man hadn't ever been seen in any big projects, such as advertising, series or films. This was to rule out the possibility that he would be uncovered a couple of days after starting our experiment," he added.
The next evening Roman and Mikhail were already cluing Boris in on their crazy idea and offering the man to spend every Saturday on a photo shoot for a small payment. They bought posh costumes for Boris, spent some time in the city center taking pictures in luxurious cars, top-class stores and expensive restaurants. And, obviously, started to post these photos on the Instagram page they created for the man.
After that, they spread some information about the man through social media platforms. In two hours, two thousand people had already started to follow the account of the man, who was feeding French loafs to the ducks on a pond or eating McDonald's burgers in the most expensive Moscow restaurant.
By the time Boris had reached the milestone of eight thousand followers, they had already received offers from TV-shows, radio and clothes brands. Young men were writing messages offering their start-up ideas. Young ladies were daily falling for an offer to provide Boris with company on an upcoming cruise.
"There is nothing difficult in developing and building a legend. The whole ambiance and all the locations for filming can be easily found within the city center. Expensive cars and private jets can be rented for a couple of thousand rubles per hour," Roman claimed on his Facebook page, revealing the truth behind Boris Bork's success.
"We have received over 300 different offers since then. However, we are not going to continue work in image making, as we aren't experts in this sphere," Roman told Sputnik.
After the revelation, Boris continues to live his own life participating in different projects he is offered from time to time, the marketing expert said. For example, the elderly man was recently seen in a new music video of the popular Russian indie group Therr Maitz.
"What conclusion can we make? None, actually. I just continue to wonder how spending 50 thousand rubles in two months can make tens of thousands of adults blindly believe in a nonexistent person," Roman concluded. These guys should certainly be recognized as the finest trolls of Instagram in 2016.
