DISCLAIMER: I am not recommending Hate Marketing as a means to advertise your creative works! In fact, please don’t! If enough people read your story, there will be at least ONE psychopath who will spread lies and interpret the worst possible message. They don’t need help from you! Just, if anything, I hope you will read this, get some mild dark humor, and then not be afraid of posting your creative works on the internet because of said psychopaths.
I have a new policy for myself: if I truly believe something is problematic/immoral/harmful/etc – I’m not gonna talk about it!
I’m not gonna go on social media about it!
If I MUST, I hope I will have the wisdom to get my facts right, to ask people with different opinions than I do, and try to be as nonbiased as possible.
Because the best way to advertise something….
is to talk about how evil and terrible it is!
Or… as I’m calling it, Hate Marketing.
What is Hate Marketing?
The people who agree with you will flock to the site, boosting its traffic, and leaving hateful comments, which will tell Google “Huh! Lots of people are talking about this site, which means it must be of high authority! Let’s put it in front of MORE people!”
Then of course, people who think you’re an alarmist moron, will gladly dump their money on whatever medium you’re trying to keep people away from (seriously, I think we’ve been so afraid of political correctness for so long, that the “Fuck You Factor” is INCREDIBLY strong right now!).
So, this is my tinfoil hat conspiracy theory: I remember when every news outlet panned The Joker with Joachim Pheonix before it even hit theaters… the same news outlets owned by Time Warner (Did you know Time Warner is trying to cell CNN right now? Crazy, right?)… which also owns DC… which made this movie…what?
So… the conspiracy theorist in me couldn’t help but wonder if Time Warner did this on purpose… that they know their news outlets are a joke. They knew people would share it out of fear of the film. and hate for the alarmist news outlets.
…or maybe I’m giving these guys too much credit and the news outlets were really all just pearl-clutching Karens and their managers just didn’t give a crap anymore.
Either way, the news outlets get lots of clicks! Joker made, literally $1.074 billion in the box office! Most of us got to see a great work of art!
Yeah, everybody wins! Not ethically, not morally, but who cares?
There’s other examples that I’ve noticed recently (a certain author who wrote a beloved children’s classic about a boy who attended a wizard school for example).
What Can We Learn from Hate Marketing?
I think there’s a dark humor to all of this. It shows we’re easily manipulated. How much the side of us that commands fear and hatred is more powerful than “Hey this is great!”
Then of course (shameless plug incoming), this made me think of my own story. What if people don’t like it? WORSE! They hate it so much that they send an army of bullies and psychos after me? As it’s easy to do with Twitter?
Well, that’s the thing about putting your art on the internet, it’s up there for everyone to see… and for everyone to criticize, and you can’t manage peoples’ expectations.
Well… I’m sad to say… this doesn’t bother me anymore. Like the old saying goes, “All press is good press.”
That being said, don’t worry, Dragonrider’s Dance isn’t going to have a story element with the latest controversy that second, people are good at coming up with their controversies as it is.
We had clickbait…. we had “You won’t believe…”, now we have “Hate Marketing.”
