Isla Campbell on the Royal Family’s carefully curated social media presence, the choreography behind the candid photograph, and why she has definitely not saved fourteen pictures of the Princess of Wales to her camera roll
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The official Instagram account of the Prince and Princess of Wales has 16.8 million followers. The account posts photographs with captions that are simultaneously carefully crafted and apparently spontaneous, which is the hardest trick in communications and the one that the Palace’s social media team has spent considerable resources learning to execute. The photographs show royals in what appear to be unstaged moments — Kate laughing at something William has said, the children running on a lawn, a working visit where someone is genuinely engaged with the people they are meeting — that are, of course, staged in the sense that a photographer was present, the release was planned, and the specific images were selected from dozens taken to find the ones that most effectively convey the desired impression.
I know all of this. I know it the way I know that film trailers are designed to make every film look unmissable and that LinkedIn posts about leadership lessons are not actually wisdom. I know it and I have looked at the account at least once this week and I have been charmed by it, which is the specific achievement that the Palace’s communications team is being paid to produce and which they are producing very effectively.
The Science of the Candid Royal
The candid royal photograph is a genre with a specific grammar that has evolved over the past decade as the institution shifted from formal portraiture as its primary public image mechanism to the kind of informal documentary photography that social media rewards. The genre requires: a setting that is recognisable but not opulent (a garden rather than a state room, a school visit rather than a banquet); an action that reads as spontaneous (looking at something together, laughing, interacting with a child or an animal); lighting that is technically excellent while appearing incidental; and a caption that describes the moment rather than the image, in language that is warm without being saccharine.
The Princess of Wales has proved particularly effective as a subject for this genre, both because she has genuine photogenic ease in documentary settings and because the narrative of her return to public duties after cancer treatment in 2024 created an emotional context in which photographs of her looking well and engaged carried significance beyond their immediate content. The photograph of her at Wimbledon, of her walking in the grounds of a royal residence, of her at a public engagement — each image carried more weight than the image itself because of what viewers knew about what preceded them. This is not manipulation in a dishonest sense. It is good communications deployed in a specific context that happened to involve real human difficulty and real public concern. The result is a public figure who is more liked and more trusted than before the illness, which serves the institution’s interests and also reflects genuine public good feeling toward a person who had a difficult year. Both things are true.
The Harry and Meghan Contrast
The existence of the Sussex communications operation — which operates through the Archewell Foundation’s channels and through the couple’s various media partnerships — creates an interesting contrast with the Palace’s approach that illuminates both. The Sussex communications strategy has attempted to build a brand of authenticity through explicit self-disclosure: the Netflix documentary, the memoir, the podcast. The Palace’s communications strategy has built authenticity through curated apparent spontaneity. Both are constructions. The Sussex construction has been received less well in the UK and better in the United States, which reflects the different appetites of those audiences for explicit self-disclosure versus implied intimacy.
The tension between the two approaches is the tension at the heart of modern celebrity communications generally: how much disclosure is enough, how much is too much, and when does transparency become its own form of performance. The Palace has landed, for now, on a strategy that reveals just enough to seem human while retaining enough privacy to seem dignified, and the strategy is working. I find this slightly annoying in the way that I find any effective manipulation of my emotions slightly annoying. I am also going to keep looking at the account because the photographs are genuinely lovely and the children are very cute, and that is how they get you, which I am aware of, and which does not stop it from working.
What All of This Is For
The social media strategy serves a constitutional purpose that is worth taking seriously alongside its cultural one. The monarchy’s survival in a democratic state depends on its popular legitimacy, which requires that the royals be seen as people rather than as inherited functionaries, as capable of genuine feeling rather than as performers of ceremonial roles. The photographs that create this impression are the mechanism by which popular legitimacy is maintained. This is not cynical; it is how constitutional monarchies sustain themselves in the modern era, and the alternative — formal, distant, opaque — is what the institution looked like when its popular legitimacy was lowest. The Instagram account is, in this sense, a constitutional instrument. That I find this both true and slightly embarrassing is very much a me problem.
Isla Campbell writes from Central London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/isla-campbell.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/palace-instagram-strategy-very-good-i-resent-how-much-working-on-me/
