Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and her husband Prince William, Duke of Cambridge competing on behalf of The Royal Foundation at the inaugural King’s Cup regatta are seen during the prize giving ceremony ahead of Cowes SailGP on August 09, 2019 in Cowes, England. Image: Clive Mason/Getty Images.
Dethroned! Prince William named ‘World’s Sexiest Bald Man’ just a PR stunt?
The Bald and the not so Beautiful: After Prince William was named ‘World’s Sexiest Bald Man’, people are asking ‘What about The Rock and Jason Statham?’
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and her husband Prince William, Duke of Cambridge competing on behalf of The Royal Foundation at the inaugural King’s Cup regatta are seen during the prize giving ceremony ahead of Cowes SailGP on August 09, 2019 in Cowes, England. Image: Clive Mason/Getty Images.
While Prince William was named the “World’s Sexiest Bald Man” earlier in March, new reports suggest that the whole situation is just a PR stunt for a firm that offers hair transplants.
Prince William’s new titles
According to IB Times, many were surprised when the Duke of Cambridge was named the ‘Sexiest Bald Man’ because, for them, someone else was more deserving, like Stanley Tucci. Others were also rooting for Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Jason Statham, and Shemar Moore.
Now, Dan Barker, a freelance consultant working in the areas of e-commerce, digital marketing and analytics, examined the report and concluded that it was a PR piece to promote a company offering hair transplants.
“The whole ‘Prince William is world’s sexiest bald man, says ‘Google study’ thing. I’m sure most people realise what’s happened, but in case not, here is a brief explanation: This is the headline on the version of the story that’s been shared the most (from the Independent),” he tweeted.
A PR stunt
The initial study concluded that 17.6 million people said Prince William was the ‘sexiest bald man’.
“That’s a huge study. Google surveys generally cost £0.08 per response, which would mean they’d spent over a million quid (over R20 million) on the study…only it’s not a survey, the detail on the methodology is just this: ‘The 38-year-old Duke has been described as ‘sexy’ a whopping 17.6 million times online in blogs, reports and pages found in Google searches, researchers found.’
Barker says that is just not how Google works.
“If you search for ‘Prince William sexy’, not all of the results will even contain those three words, let alone in the context of there being a relationship between them…So what is actually going on? It’s a PR piece by a firm called Longevita, who offer… hair transplants. They’ve put the story out to The Sun, who have published it…
Barker says it ultimately suits Longevita for Prince William to be top of the list, because Longevita offer hair transplants.
“They want to one, keep their name out there and get lots of mentions related to baldness and second of all, actually they do *not* want to position baldness as ‘sexy’.
“So having Prince William and baldness being made fun of, rather than people swooning over photos of Jason Statham, or Stanley Tucci, or Bruce Willis makes good sense…outcome: – Longevita got a bunch of mentions (arguably they messed up a bit too, by not publishing the study on their site and picking up links)”.
In on the joke
Prince William has actually poked fun at his baldness on a couple of occasions.
Back in 2017, the Prince shook hands with some local London-based barbers saying: “I don’t have much hair, I can’t give you much business.”
