Brands try to reflect culture, and in 2025, culture was prone to getting riled up. Don’t believe it? Just look at Oxford University Press’s word of the year. That’s right. It’s “ragebait.”
Throughout the year, brands like American Eagle, Skims, e.l.f., Dunkin’, Swatch, and The Ordinary, to name a few, made people very mad—so mad, in fact, that those brands got a lot of attention. And, as marketers previously told us, in the age of the attention economy, any kind of engagement—even angry engagement—can sometimes be worthwhile.
“Brands are desperate right now,” Sam Ogborn, a marketing strategist and consultant, told Marketing Brew. “Brands have recognized that they can game the system, the system being the algorithm, to get attention, and free attention at that. The way that they’ve learned they can get this cheap, easy, free attention is through ragebait, but it’s fleeting and it’s volatile.”
The surge in ragebait comes at a time when getting consumer attention has only gotten harder. For years, though, algorithms have favored rage, and the ripple effects of how the algorithms work have seemingly trickled into every facet of culture. But the year of ragebait marketing isn’t as simple as it may seem.
This year, some marketers found that even efforts that had been routine, like rebrands, could land them smack in the middle of the culture wars. What’s more, it’s harder to know what’s real: As Marketing Brew previously reported, some of the rage that brands like Cracker Barrel and Tylenol faced this year was found by researchers to be manufactured or boosted by bot traffic. Even Taylor Swift may have faced a coordinated online attack this year, per Rolling Stone.
Intentional or not?
In the case of American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” arguably the most-talked-about ragebait ad campaign of the year, the ads starring the actor dominated the headlines for nearly half the year. In November, Sweeney riled the internet up once again for her reaction to the controversy: “I did a jean ad,” she said in response to a question from a GQ editor about the campaign. In early December, the actor spoke to People with a more direct response, where she clarified that she was opposed to “hate and divisiveness” and said that she had come to realize her silence only exacerbated the issue.
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Douglas Brundage, founder and CEO of brand studio Kingsland, said he sees many of the campaigns at the center of the ragebait marketing conversation as “unintentional” examples. If brands don’t understand or know how to execute the cultural marketing they seek to do, he said, it could easily be read as brands intentionally angering their audience.
“I think brands need to learn to actually read culture, which means understanding things before they happen or when they’re still nascent,” he said. “A lot of brands are very reactive, and so they probably have put campaigns out there that they didn’t expect people to get upset about, and then pivot to crisis management mode, which, in my mind, creates even more opportunities to mess up your brand.”
Understanding culture
Reading the culture is a key part of any marketer’s job, but there’s risk if brands don’t make time and resources to do it, Lola Bakare, a CMO advisor, inclusive marketing strategist, and owner of marketing consultancy be/co, previously told Marketing Brew.
“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 at the time. “A lot of people have not nurtured and invested in that education, so they’re falling short.”
Regardless of marketers’ intent or investment, the proliferation of ragebait in marketing may have some marketers more skittish about their campaigns, afraid to take a stance or ruffle any customers’ feathers with something provocative or spending too much time worrying about how it could be received in the future.
“It’s created a marketing industry that’s afraid,” Eunice Shin, founder and CEO of brand consultancy The Elume Group, said. “I think in many cases, fear and being super cautious is holding back creativity and unique identity and a voice that could be important for brands…what it’s caused is this timidity that I think is hurting marketing.”
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