#and hterefore it's harder to judge whether what's happened will impact

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

So, now that holivia is over, what are your thoughts on the stunt. Do you think Harry and his team consider it a success or a failure? It got him in the press so if the goal was fame then i guess it was a success. But if the goal was to have a believable beard, that failed miserably since most fans saw through the pr relationship. I'm leaning more towards failure only because with all that headlining press, came some criticism of Harry which he was able to avoid for years.

So I disagree with your framing in two quite important ways. The first is that evaluation is rarely an on/off switch and I'd be surprised if that was the way Harry and his team talked about pretending to date Olivia. Most things are far more messy than either being a success or a failure and very little useful comes from asking about things in those terms. There are lots more interesting options when it comes to how to think of things, but even a cost and benefit analysis is more useful than success or failure.

The second is the way you centre what fans think. Marketers (and certainly anyone who has access to data) are behaviourists; they do not care what you think, they care what you do. Whatever the goal was for Harry and Olivia - how fans saw it was not a major concern.

I know this is super nitpicky - but I really think it does make a difference to the way we understand things. I think both a binary definition of success and failure and overvaluing what fans think are key errors of assumptions.

Anyway having said all that - the problem with evaluating anything in fandom is that we don't know what the goals were and we don't know what the restrictions are.

I would say be benefits of Harry and Olivia pretending to date are quite clear. He was able to do a queer movie that probably reflects his life without any risk of being outted. Harry has seen huge commercial success since pretending to date Olivia. Harry's House really took him into the next level as a popstar. That's true both of the album itself and its metrics. Also the wider awareness of him as a popstar and cultural figure (which the relationship directly contributed to). But perhaps most importantly you saw a significant increase in how engaged you had to be with Harry Styles to buy a concert ticket - and the fact that people who had a much more casual relationship with him were buying tickets is obviously super important.

On the costs side you have the fact that there has been a backlash, a small one mostly based around queerbaiting and then a wider one in relation to his movie career. I think his relationship with Olivia indirectly contributed to one and directly contributed to the other. How much that's considered a cost of being as big as he is and how much can be directly tracked back to the fake relationship would be a hard calculation, but to me it's reasonable obvious that some of it is as a result of pretending to be in a relationship.

What else would go in a cost benefit equation?

#There is a question of the impact on Harry's movie career #but I find that hard to untangle #with how his performances were received #and also #while it seems to be very clear what he wants as a musician #it's much less clear what he wants as an actor #and hterefore it's harder to judge whether what's happened will impact