No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Difference between revisions

* King Features fired Bobby London as the artist on the ''[[Popeye]]'' comic strip (which were reprinted in paperback as "Mondo Popeye") after they rejected a storyline in which Olive tries to return a Cabbage Patch Bluto, equating it as a metaphor on abortion.

* An issue of ''[[Life With Archie: The Married Life]]'' fell under controversy from news outlets and parent groups, for depicting the wedding of Archie's [[Invisible to Gaydar]] friend, Kevin Keller. It went on to sell out at several retailers.

 

== Film ==

* [[Michael Bay]] is one of the most ''hated'' people on the internet, even on this very wiki people had to prevent pages for his movies from being excessively vandalized and slandered. Hasn't hurt his popularity.

* Mocked and exploited simultaneously by director [[Kevin Smith]] when he surreptitiously joined a group of Catholics protesting his film ''[[Dogma]]'' outside a New Jersey theatre -- and kept up the [[Kayfabe]] when he was caught by a news crew doing so.

 

== Literature ==

** During a television special on ''[[The Da Vinci Code]]'', one of the authors of ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail'' willingly and deliberately provided a lot of information on both books and was actually pretty informative. It seems the authors didn't care so much about having Dan Brown using similar ideas to them because it got them a lot more publicity and opportunities to appear on television to advertise their book. Very smart!

* ''[[Harry Potter]]''. While a great deal of its fame and popularity is deserved (it's reasonably well-written and interesting), it owes at least some of its success to the [[Moral Guardians]] who can't shut up about how it's corrupting children.

* ''Mein Kampf'', [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]]'s famous screed, is banned in Germany. Despite this, it still makes the bestsellers list there almost every year. Note that the book itself cannot make it to the bestseller list, given that it wasn't openly sold in its entirety in Germany for nearly 60 years now. The Bavarian state has the copyright for that book that will expire in 2015 (70 years after Hitler's death) and tightly controls reprinting and selling of uncommented or complete copies in Germany. The only openly available prints outside of the Internet are either old, commented or cut.

* Al Franken wrote a book called "[[Anvilicious|Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right]]". [[Fox News]], which has a well-known and long-running grudge with Franken, immediately sued for use of the "Fair and Balanced" tagline, in an attempt to prevent the book from being published. As a result, a lot of people bought the book just to see what all the hubbub was about.

** There's a good chance that he would have made a comeback if he had lived longer. It should be noted, though, that Andy Dick has pursued a similar strategy, and has also suffered from bad publicity overdose.

* By now you surely already know that Charlie Sheen got booed during his first presentation of his comedy show, how did you found out Charlie Sheen had a comedy show?

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* ''[[Doom]]'' received some free publicity for it's violent content but especially after the Columbine High School shootings, when the media got a hold of the fact that the shooters were fans of the game, and reported ([[Blatant Lies|falsely]]) that one of them had used the game's level mod feature to design levels that resembled the school.

* ''[[Big Rigs Over the Road Racing]],'' a game infamous for [[Obvious Beta|being pre-alpha]] and having the [[Broke the Rating Scale|having the lowest score for a game on Metacritic]] sold 20,000 copies.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* The only reason anyone knows about ''[[Sonichu]]'' is because of its author's exploits around the internet, many of them having severely damaged the man's credibility. The author himself, on the other hand, stands firmly by this trope, and believes himself to have a loyal fanbase of over a billion readers judging by the number of hits his Youtube videos receive.

* Mentioned in-story in ''[[Freefall]]'', [http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2200/fc02162.htm by Sam.]

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* Anna Chapman, the Russian spy who lived in Britain, who was a well-known example of [[The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything]], seems to be heading this way. Now she's heading into [[Memetic Mutation]] status, and possibly [[Popcultural Osmosis]], but [[Your Mileage May Vary]] on this.

* After the US government got angry at Wikileaks for leaking the government's top secrets, giving it mass media coverage, Wikileaks is higher in the Google Suggestions pool than [[Wikipedia]], which has been around and popular for years. Now a very large portion of Internet users know the USA's top secrets. Let's not forget that in order to be that shallow in the Google Suggestions pool, it must have been searched by Google users a whole lot of times. Before the publicity, it was not too well-known. But, after the media coverage, there are now over 300 mirrors, meaning that this will stay on the Internet... forever. [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|Oo]][[Nice Job Fixing It, Villain|ps?]]

* Those who subscribe to the "She outed herself" theory of the Traci Lords underage porn scandal (which includes pretty much adult performer and director active at the time) believe this was much of the motivation behind the initial outing: Lords wanted to ride the controversy into a mainstream film career. If that truly was the case (it's still unknown who actually leaked Lords' actual age), mission accomplished. Lords has had a respectable non-porn career.

* Budding author Jacqueline Howett, author of ''Greek Seaman'', threw a fit upon getting a review that critiqued her grammar. The review, and her completely unfounded, myopic, and immature comments can be found here: http://booksandpals.blogspot.com/2011/03/greek-seaman-jacqueline-howett.html In one of her comments she states that she's been getting an increase in sales due to the blog having gone viral.

* This is the reason you do not feed the [[troll]]s, ever.

* In April 2012, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM<ref>No, not like the [[Fun with Acronyms|sound of eating something yummy]]</ref>) began a boycott of Starbucks for its company statement affirming approval of same-sex marriage, the main issue NOM opposes. [http://instinctmagazine.com/blogs/blog/nom-s-boycott-is-already-impacting-starbucks?directory=100011 It seems to have backfired]{{Dead link}}. This was parodied by a ''[[Huffington Post]]'' article [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-wooledge/microsoft-apple-unite-to-_b_1394821.html in which Microsoft and Apple request a similar boycott].

* [[Donald Trump]] won the nomination of the Republican Party and then was elected President of the United States in 2016 despite some of the most uniformly negative press coverage in the history of political campaigns. Apparently his detractors did not stop to think that if they never stopped talking about Trump, then they would never let Trump fade from the news cycle, and thus gave him -- for free -- higher name recognition than any candidate not already an incumbent President has ever known.

** They also apparently forgot that sticking to a relentlessly negative message and predictions of doom when your opponent's campaign speeches largely focus on 'vote for me and I will do stuff that makes you happy, pinkie swear' means that a) your partisans will be heartened b) your opponents will be enraged and c) all the people in the middle who don't care strongly about politics will find the other guy more reassuring to listen to and thus at least vaguely drift in his direction, meaning that you end up losing. Which is actually an aversion of this trope in that there ''was'' such a thing as bad publicity for Trump's opponents, even if it was self-inflicted via blowback.