Emma Watson nude photos hoax: why not all publicity is good publicity | Science and scepticism

Emma Watson nude photos hoax: why not all publicity is good publicity

The hoax threat made to Emma Watson is the most high-profile of countless recent examples undermining the claim that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Where does this belief come from, and is there ever any truth to it?

It recently emerged that the threats made to Emma Watson about releasing (non-existent) nude photos of her, in response to her UN speech, were in fact a hoax. The spoof threats were attributed to a PR company called Rantic.com, which was itself revealed to be a hoax. The point of it all seems to be to generate web traffic.

It would take a better person than me to untangle the complex knot of soulless cynicism and unethical manipulations that this story has become. I’m just a common or garden neuroscientist. But one thing this does reveal is that, in our interconnected, online society, the belief that “all publicity is good publicity” or “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” is alive and well.

There is a kind of logic to this, especially since web traffic now produces revenue. The Emma Watson hoax appears to have been an (ultimately successful) attempt to generate web traffic (not for her of course, but the whole scheme clearly didn’t give a damn about her needs either way). After all, a web tracker doesn’t discriminate between clicks resulting from genuine interest and clicks resulting from outrage or offence, as the Daily Mail know all too well. Money you con out of someone can still be used to buy groceries, at the end of the day.

But this idea that all publicity/attention is beneficial and desirable is, of course, nonsensical. Following the recent theft and posting online of naked pictures of high-profile female celebrities, it was depressingly common to see accusations online that the women clearly wanted the pictures to be seen as they were “after attention”. Because when you’re a beautiful double-Oscar winning lead-in-a-major-movie-franchise A-list celebrity at the age of 24 like Jennifer Lawrence, one of the major problems you must face is a lack of attention being paid to you.

Perhaps this is actually true for some people? Your Kardashians, your Kanye Wests, your Paris Hiltons; they seemingly thrive under the constant scrutiny and attention they get, be it positive or not. But this is only a narrow sample, and far from conclusive that publicity = good in every context.

If you base the argument on publicity means money from things like web traffic, then bad publicity has seriously damaged the bank balance of many major companies, eg Tesco, this very week. In terms of individuals, the reality TV explosion has given us a glut of people famous purely for being shameless attention seekers. And yet even these people can get burned by bad publicity, as Sam Pepper very recently discovered. And even a long and respected career in the limelight can still be undone if the publicity is bad enough, such as getting caught up in Operation Yewtree.

Unawareness of bad publicity can totally change someone’s image, so you get respected academics like Susan Greenfield and Richard Dawkins eventually being widely perceived – incorrectly or otherwise – as a self-serving scaremonger and a cantankerous internet troll (respectively) by people from their own fields. People who once looked up to them.

There are so many examples of bad publicity being, you know, very bad. So why does this view that the opposite is true persist?

There is, in fairness, some psychological foundation to the idea. There’s something known as the “mere exposure effect”, whereby a person will grow to feel more positive toward something merely because they’ve been exposed to it enough to become familiar with it. And, as research into branding reveals, this preference for the familiar can be profitable if you’re able to exploit it.

You might argue that humans aren’t so simple that they can’t distinguish between something that is familiar for good reasons or familiar for bad reasons. Well, they can, but they often don’t. Human memory is a slippery thing, and one of its properties is that recall differs from recognition. This is why you can recognise someone without knowing how you know them. We’ve all had that infuriating experience where we’re looking at or even talking to someone and can’t remember how we know them. Then they say something that reminds us and it all comes flooding back; this is the recall threshold, where you remember the actual context of how you know the person.

So publicity can be a balancing act, between making someone or something recognisable, but not so blatantly associated with unpleasant information that they’re off-putting.

The claim that all publicity is good publicity has unclear origins, but it seems to be at least a century old. This is important as it originates at a time when the act of getting publicity was a lot harder than it is now, so any you managed to get was a lot more potent. Comedian and quiz wizard (quizzard?) Paul Sinha has a brilliant anecdote that sums this up, concerning Jim Davidson and That’s Life. See if you can find it (legally).

The point is, when getting publicity was so much more of an achievement, the exact nature of that publicity would likely have been less important. My gran used to cut out and keep any mention of our home valley in the local papers, despite the fact that about 80% concerned someone’s premature death. Now, we have hundreds of TV channels and an abundance of people willing to be on them for any reason, and an internet filled with websites, downloads, Facebooks and Twitters that we can access at any time THROUGH OUR PHONES!

People can choose what to pay attention to now, and they have an abundance of choice. As such, publicity is a totally different thing these days, but the notion that just getting publicity is all important persists. The fact that there are whole industries dedicated to publicity probably contributes to this, and it’s probably easier to generate “some” publicity as opposed to specifically “good” publicity, just as reality TV is no doubt cheaper to make than detailed, scripted drama.

So there are reasons to explain why the idea that there’s no such thing as bad publicity persists. But it’s clearly not the case and the truth is, as ever, far more complex and chaotic. And if you still remain unconvinced, consider this; if all publicity is good publicity, why do libel laws exist?

Dean Burnett is a shameless attention seeker so always puts his Twitter account at the end of his blogposts like some sort of sad case yearning for the validation of strangers. @garwboy

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