Hooked on Rage

By Aria Novosedlik

As the expression of anger, rage is the most potent emotion of all. This isn’t a subjective statement; it can easily be proven through the use of an MRI machine and a willing participant.  All you need to do is lay them down in a giant, magnetic tube and remind them of things that piss them off. You’ll immediately see their amygdala—the region of the brain responsible for processing emotions—light up like a Christmas tree. And speaking of Christmas (and rage), it turns out I wasn’t the only one who spent part of theirs shamelessly rejoicing while watching one of the internet’s greatest trolls—Jake Paul—get KO’d by gold medal Olympian Anthony Joshua in a $180 million boxing match. 

Comments like ‘this was the best thing to happen in 2025’ and ‘finally we get the Christmas present we all wanted’ rolled in across all platforms. Of course, Paul knows people hate him. He’s got the art of rage baiting—the use of inflammatory content to produce engagement—down pat. He’s so skilled at it that he managed to secure himself and Joshua a combined $180 mil payday for their Netflix-broadcasted fight by elevating the time-honoured tradition of pre-fight shit-talking to new heights. Of course, the hurling of bizarre insults about the Boston Tea Party by Paul towards a calm and collected Joshua wasn’t designed to enrage AJ—it was meant to enrage to enrage you and I.  

Interestingly, rage and hunger significantly overlap in the brain, sharing neural pathways and chemical signals (hence the whole ‘hangry’ phenomenon). That’s why in round six, when AJ backed Paul into the corner and delivered a jaw-crushing right hook that destroyed him, there was a collective feeling of being sated. As you may have guessed, similar to rage and hunger, revenge and satiation also overlap. However, the feeling of fullness from the vicarious revenge AJ gifted us with is brief. The rage/hunger-revenge/satiation cycle will restart, maybe even more dramatically.

It is this cycle that saw Oxford University Press declare ‘rage bait’ as the word of 2025. While not a novel tactic, its use has sharply risen in correlation with the growing political divide both in America and worldwide. At this point in late-stage capitalism, we’re in a cultural race to the bottom. With Trump’s second inauguration, the attention consumers usually pay to the cultural zeitgeist—including advertising—has been diverted back to Donroe’s shocking antics.

President McDonald Trump: the master baiter

Again, though: before the extreme market segmentation caused by algorithms and social media, rage bait still existed. It was a far riskier gamble—one nearly impossible to get right since hyper-targeted advertising didn’t exist. Take Bacardi’s 2009 ‘The Ugly Girlfriend’ campaign.

Just plain mean

The ads featured overweight women in terrible outfits, offered up as ‘hotness-boosting accessories’ that would comparatively make you look great. It was promptly pulled, because 17 years ago we didn’t exist in echo chambers that insulate us from judgment should we laugh at something that’s just plain mean. 

We love you mom. Now get back to work

A few years later in 2011, Mr.Clean made a failed attempt at rage bait with its ‘Mothers Day’ ad in which a woman is seen with her daughter, cleaning a window. It reads ‘This Mother’s Day, get Back to the job that really matters’. Younger generations did not approve.

Nowadays, the same reason we’re experiencing unprecedented levels of divisiveness in society accounts for why good rage bait is successful: not only is it cost-effective and guaranteed to grab eyeballs, it can be targeted. Effective rage bait won’t even register as such to potential customers you’re trying to convert. They’ll either feel compelled to defend your content against those that are enraged by it, or to engage with a sense of curiosity. The Jake v. AJ fight engaged both the lovers and haters of Jake, and gave AJ a huge new fanbase. 

Jake Paul: pre-fight shit-talking all the way to the bank

Well-thought-out rage bait causes the consumer to affirm their allegiance in the comment section, while also triggering the opposition—those for whom the rage bait is meant to negatively engage—to enter revenge mode. Instead of swiping past the bait, anger persuades them to spend minutes crafting a sharp-tongued retort, all while unknowingly boosting the content by causing the algorithm to assume they’re lingering on it for good reason. It’s a clever win-win.

Rage bait is far more effective when the viewer is the product, not the target. Engagement doesn’t equal sales. American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ads indeed boosted traffic, leading to an increase in stock price for a few months after the campaign, while sales only rose a paltry 1%. There was no sustained uplift. Not only did AE fail to understand its customer base (aka not MAGA boomers), it appears to have been misled by its marketing team. Nobody told them that more eyeballs only means more money if the product is views. 

Likewise, cosmetic line E.L.F. took a shot at the bait tactic by using ‘comedian’ Matt Rife in their 2025 campaign and touched all the wrong nerves. For those unaware, Matt Rife is a straight white male who opened his special ‘Natural Selection’ with a ‘joke’ about domestic violence. He explains that upon entering a restaurant, the hostess seating him had a ‘full black eye’. He notes that they shouldn’t have her as the face of the restaurant and that she should be hidden in the kitchen to cook instead. Then he retracts that suggestion, noting how if she could actually cook, she wouldn’t have gotten the black eye in the first place. The joke was the subject of much uproar online and resulted in being boycotted in August 2025. Consumers took their grievances one step further than they had with AE, who dog whistled their discrimination instead of using a megaphone.

Here’s the thing about us humans: we love a hero. To get one, there’s got to be a villain. In the Jake Paul v. AJ fight, that was Paul. For him, it worked, because again, the views gave both parties a giant payday. Unfortunately when you’ve got a product to sell, playing the villain—as American Eagle did—doesn’t pan out. That said, it did create space for a hero brand to swoop in and save the day: tried and true legacy brand Gap. 

Its beautifully crafted, immaculately choreographed ‘Better in Denim’ commercial was released in August 2025, mere weeks after the AE debacle. People of all shades, shapes, and genders delivered slick moves to Kelis’ classic ‘milkshake’. And yes, it’s better than yours AE. But I’m sure Gap thanks you for the set up to a slam-dunk.

Aria Novosedlik is a Toronto-based designer, writer and researcher.