Rage Against the Screen: The Problem with Ragebait Marketing

If you've been on the internet recently, you’ve probably seen an advert by the sports trading app, Novig. It features a scantily clad Sydney Sweeney, perched upon various basketball hoops as she hides her body behind strategically placed sports equipment. As she smolders into the camera, Sweeney coos to the viewer about how focused the company is on “just sports” (a phrase she repeats, over the course of the advert, about sixteen times), rolling around on snooker tables and unoriginally displaying the idea that sex apparently sells.

Novig’s advert seemingly lit the internet on fire, from sportswomen rightfully outraged at their profession being sexualised, to others debating Sweeney’s inclusion, as a woman, as “her body, her choice.” However, in the vast sea of reactions, there was one particular type of response that caught my eye that went along the lines of: “Why are you angry, it’s just ragebait!”

And my response to that is … well, obviously! Sweeney’s presence in anything these days seems to start some kind of debate, and this flippant sexualisation of women in sports pretty much confirmed it.  The “it’s not that deep” mentality dismisses any valid critiques of the advert. You can’t just denounce something as ragebait and magically wave away its impact — such dismissals put the onus on the outraged viewer rather than on the company creating said outrage. 

Ragebaiting as a marketing tactic is nothing new, just a new form of ‘any publicity is good publicity.’ In fact, in the last year, Sweeney’s presence in another advert swept up controversy when American Eagle was infamously accused of promoting eugenics. Whether or not the brand set out to anger the world is unknown, but the heated debate that it caused raged on for months, keeping American Eagle in the public consciousness. That's the point.

In the age of algorithms, it seems that controversy gets the most views. I mean, how often have you read a tweet spouting something offensive or watched a reel where an influencer deliberately ruins what they’re working on? It’s all intentional: they want you to be angry. Because everyone — including you — has run to the comments to express their annoyance, that video now has more attention. Online, the loudest, angriest, most controversial takes are what's under the spotlight. 

That's where the real problem lies with ragebait marketing, because while we can argue that it’s “not that deep,” this kind of ecosystem bleeds into the real world. In an increasingly angry political climate, it has become a strategy of those in power to value provocation over facts. Not only does their ragebait become part of their political brand, à la “owning the libs,” but it helps to cultivate an environment that caters to their most extreme supporters who are looking for a reason to be angry.

So yes, a company using ragebait as a marketing tactic really is “that deep.” And as for the company that started this all, their new tactic hasn’t entirely paid off: according to Peak Metrics, in an analysis of posts made about the advert, only 4% were focused on Novig as a company. With much of the publicity going to Sweeney, this suggests that the ragebait has overshadowed the company that created it in the first place. As for the next advertisement campaign, I would stick to “just sports”.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons