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It’s hard to make people happy. But in today’s attention economy, some brands are getting good at making people very, very mad.
This year, The Ordinary, Skims, e.l.f., Nyx Cosmetics, and, perhaps most famously, American Eagle, have faced accusations of ragebaiting, or the practice of generating anger-fueled online engagement, in various marketing campaigns and product announcements that seemed tailor-made to evoke a response. At the same time, creators like Winta Zesu and Louisa Melcher have built followings in the hundreds of thousands on social platforms by riling up audiences with fake stories and scenarios. Some creators have even found success in fanning the flames of brand campaign dramas as a way to drive their own growth.
In the attention economy, views are currency, and marketers told us that many brands are feeling the pressure to stand out and go viral at just about any cost. But all press may not be good press, and controversy, whether intentional or not, doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to long-term marketing success for brands, experts told us.
“The short-term bump in attention is not really worth the trade-off of damaging brand equity,” Lia Haberman, a social and influencer marketing consultant and author of the ICYMI newsletter, said.
Some marketers may realize the risks of riling up various corners of the internet, but in a time of intense polarization online, social experts said keeping brands out of any heated discourse requires diligence and awareness of bad-faith campaign interpretations that could pull them in.
“We are in a sloppy era,” Haberman said. “I think it’s less about ragebait or outrage marketing, and really [about] carelessness or sloppiness in not thinking about who your audience is, how your messages have come across, [or] the choices of the creators or the talent that you’re using.”
Rage alongside the machine
American Eagle’s controversial Sydney Sweeney campaign is just one recent example that got plenty of people talking. Company executives have defended the campaign, which drew backlash over the summer for its references to genetics, and CMO Craig Brommers told Marketing Brew last month that the campaign wasn’t designed as intentional ragebait, but instead aimed at sparking “a conversation about optimism, confidence, and self-expression”; so far, the company has reported initially positive results.
Megan Morass, co-founder and CEO of the creative agency Full Fat, told us that even a single controversial brand post can make consumers feel anxious, which can be damaging to brand equity, trust, and value in the long term. “It’s quite a risky tactic as a marketer to use,” she said. “You’re putting something out into the world that is, on purpose, trying to incite rage or frustration from your audience.”
In the case of American Eagle, Morass said she’s interested to see if the brand sees long-term success beyond the short-term sales results. In contrast, Morass pointed to Gap’s feel-good denim ad with girl group KATSEYE released around the same time, which has proved to be the brand’s most viral campaign to date, and which she believes will drive greater brand love in the long run.
If a brand is intent on courting controversy, Morass pointed to a Doritos campaign from earlier this year, in which the brand implied it might change its signature triangle chip shape into a square, as exemplary. The campaign drew some backlash and plenty of online chatter, but all in good fun.
“That is really nicely done ragebait, if there is such a thing,” Morass said. “It’s nothing serious. It’s not going to create any emotional [or] behavioral triggers.”
Dulma Altan, a TikTok creator who posts about business strategy, said ragebait can be risky for creators and brands alike, even if it can deliver results. While she pointed to the Kardashians and Gwyneth Paltrow as celebrities who have seemingly figured out how to harness outrage into tangible brand outcomes, she considers them to be exceptions to the rule.
“I’m convinced that brands and prominent public figures might accidentally stir up controversy, but then they realize that either that controversy can be beneficial for brand awareness and can be harnessed in some way, or they realize they can never really avoid it, so [they think], ‘Why not just use it and try to keep it contained?’” Altan said.
If ragebait becomes a widely adopted strategy, Morass said she anticipates that audiences might unfollow brands to avoid seeing it.
“We need to make the marketing industry take responsibility for the impact that it has on audience mental health,” she said. “As marketeers, we’re responsible for uplifting and empowering our consumers, not bringing them down.”
Overdue diligence
While some brands may ragebait intentionally, Haberman said she suspects that for many brands, it’s likely accidental.
“In retrospect, a lot of these companies probably wish that they were strategic and savvy enough to have orchestrated this as ragebait or outrage marketing to increase conversation and awareness around their product or product launch,” she said.
Lola Bakare, a CMO advisor, inclusive marketing strategist, and owner of marketing consultancy be/co, said she believes it’s a marketer’s responsibility to understand how a campaign could be received across audiences before it goes live.
“Marketers are being held responsible for the importance of having a high level of cultural literacy, which has always and should always have been part of the job,” Bakare said. “A lot of people have not nurtured and invested in that education, so they’re falling short.”
Take, for instance, e.l.f.’s recent campaign featuring comedian Matt Rife. The company reportedly focused on Rife’s TikTok audience when signing him, e.l.f. CMO Kory Marchisotto told Business of Fashion, but the brand seems to have overlooked Rife’s past remarks making light of domestic violence in a Netflix special, which outraged some consumers. Marchisotto acknowledged that the campaign missed the mark in the interview, explaining that the brand doesn’t “[look] in the rearview mirror when operating the real-time marketing machine.”
Haberman pointed to the e.l.f. campaign as “a really great example of not spending maybe an extra half-hour manually scrolling through somebody’s feed, looking on Reddit, and seeing how people are talking about this creator.”
Increasingly, experts said, marketers should be prepared for backlash even when a business decision may seem innocuous. That’s because there may be broader forces at play: the negative reactions to Cracker Barrel’s recent minimalistic rebrand, which prompted the brand to reverse course, were reportedly driven by bot networks, while social intelligence platform Open Measures reported that backlash to American Eagle’s campaign was amplified by “conservative political personalities.”
Altan noted that social platforms can benefit from this type of engagement, whether orchestrated or organic, which she suspects means this practice will only continue.
“We have to remember that the smartest engineers in the entire world are all being paid millions of dollars to figure out how to get us constantly enraged,” Altan said. “The odds are stacked against us.”
As the political divide deepens and people look for signs from brands to see what they stand for, Haberman advised marketers to be forthright about brand values to minimize confusion.
“If you don’t put your stance and your beliefs and your values out there,” she said, “somebody is going to ascribe those values to you.”
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