Tech founder Avi Schiffmann spent around a million dollars this autumn papering New York City’s subways with ads proclaiming that Friend, an AI device worn like a necklace, is a better support system than human companions.
The ads were less about selling the device, he said, than getting people to talk about it — for good or ill.
On those terms, at least, it worked. Riders, angry at the encroachment of AI, vandalized many of the ads with scrawled messages such as “Stop capitalizing on loneliness” and “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died.” Anti-AI social media chatter featuring photos of the defaced ads started gaining traction online.
Schiffmann, 23, sat back and watched the attention roll in. When subway workers started washing the graffiti off the ads, he raced on foot to the West 4th Street station to beg them to stop.
“I wanted Friend to be a scapegoat for everything people don’t like about the world right now,” Schiffmann said. The campaign’s viral success, he added, was primarily the work of online posters rushing to smear Friend’s product and presentation. All he did was set the bait.
Schiffmann is hardly alone. Ragebait — the art of making people mad on social media — has graduated this year from a growth hack for online influencers to a corporate marketing strategy. This week Oxford University Press declared “rage bait” 2025’s word of the year, finding the term’s usage has tripled in the last 12 months.
Nucleus Genomics, a fertility start-up, promoted its genetic screening with a campaign telling onlookers to “have your best baby.” Then it posted ads declaring “these babies have good genes” outside early-aughts retailer American Eagle’s flagship Manhattan store, a play on that company’s controversial “good jeans” campaign featuring starlet Sydney Sweeney. People blasted Nucleus’s ads for promoting eugenics, but the company said its sales popped.
Courting controversy doesn’t always pay off financially. Friend, a previously little-known start-up with fewer than 1,000 daily users, won tens of millions of views on social media, where it was broadly condemned as a hollow imitation of human relationships. But Schiffman’s ragebait campaign didn’t create any meaningful boost in sales.
AI “Friend” device’s marketing campaign keeps getting vandalized in NYC subway system. pic.twitter.com/hdTfnH8vI6
— Jack Mac (@JackMacCFB) September 26, 2025
Still, experts say the strategy perfectly reflects a polarized political atmosphere, algorithms that feed on fury and a populous primed to lash out. Companies willing to play the villain in the never-ending drama of the internet can end up winners.
“Some advertising and marketing agencies are now intentionally leaning into the volatility of the current political climate, not to take a stand but to manufacture outrage,” said Mikah Sellers, an advertising consultant who has worked with major brands including Booz Allen Hamilton and Carfax. Companies are tapping into cultural rifts and driving wedges in hopes of capitalizing on the strife, he said.
Several other recent campaigns have prompted outrage online. Pippa, a skin care line for toddlers, had beauty commenters in a tizzy about the industry targeting ever-younger customers. When Sabrina Carpenter dropped an album cover showing the singer on her hands and knees while an out-of-frame man yanks her by the hair, the internet launched into a debate on whether she was highlighting women’s subjugation or empowerment. And venture-backed company Clad Labs drew eyeballs — and eye rolls — by releasing a “brainrot code editor” that lets developers gamble, watch TikTok and use dating apps while they work.
Emerging research indicates that content poking at two main emotions — anger and anxiety — gets more customer engagement than other approaches, according to Wendy Moe, a professor at University of Maryland who studies social media marketing.
In the past, if a company released an ad and got a negative reaction, it would pull the campaign from circulation, Moe said. Today, marketers are poised to leverage that reaction to gain even more attention.
While social media algorithms have always favored the outrageous, 2025 seemed to usher in an era of large-scale ragebait marketing, said Jieun Shin, a professor at the University of Florida who studies how ideas spread online. An explosion of low-quality AI content and constant promotional posting from creators have made mainstream social media feel crowded and frenetic, she said, and companies are desperate to break through the noise.
Americans, meanwhile, are “primed to be triggered,” Shin said, with a presidential administration that knows how to stir up emotions online, as do some of its opponents.
In response, companies have started using ad campaigns to seed online arguments, said MJ Corey, a cultural critic who studies the Kardashian family. When Kim Kardashian’s clothing brand Skims announced earlier this year it would start selling merkins (wigs for pubic hair), it was less about the product and more about providing a “prompt for discourse,” Corey said. Like clockwork, people rushed to social media to share their takes on the $32 faux-hair thong, generating more buzz for the brand.
Tech start-ups are taking notes
For Silicon Valley start-ups, an AI boom that requires billions of dollars in funding and risks leaving millions unemployed is providing perfect fodder for ragebait. The start-up Cluely in April began touting a “Cheating Tool for Literally Everything.” The nascent company’s viral video ad showed CEO Chungin “Roy” Lee at a romantic dinner using AI to look up his date’s social media profiles in real time and then use the information to lie to her about his age, job and interests.
“The future won’t reward effort,” Cluely’s marketing copy said. “So, start cheating.”
Lee’s devil-may-care attitude towards conventional morality was instantly rewarded. He raised $15 million in funding in a few months from reputable venture capitalists, he said, all without a product.
Lee was playing off a broader shift in the tech industry’s self-promotional style. Nowadays, leading CEOs opt for bro-ey podcasts over magazine covers; they embrace controversy rather than tout their philanthropic donations. In a manifesto on Substack titled “Go Direct,” sought-after PR guru Lulu Cheng Meservey advised company founders to sidestep traditional media, which she said has crumbling credibility, and speak to audiences on their own terms.
“Those who are stubborn, unorthodox, and disagreeable should never have their edges filed down for fear of offending entrenched interests,” Meservey wrote last year.
When AI company Artisan plastered San Francisco with billboards urging onlookers to “stop hiring humans,” CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack was counting on the company’s haters to post about the ads, he said. He seeded Reddit forums with posts critical of the campaign and watched the upvotes soar. His business model doesn’t even hinge on replacing humans in the workforce, he noted, but most people didn’t take the time to check before amplifying the ad online.
“I think 99 percent of [consumers] aren’t aware that it’s just marketing and they think it’s a serious thing,” he said.
“Stop hiring humans. The Era of AI Employees is Here.” Billboards across the country are promoting the replacement of millions of jobs with AI and robotics. Great idea. One simple question: How will those displaced workers survive when there are no jobs or income for them? pic.twitter.com/EstPlRMhV5
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 27, 2025
Tapping into public outrage may not pay off in the long-term. Cluely pivoted from its AI cheating tool, which never materialized, to a more conventional AI note-taking app this month. Onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in October, Lee admitted that actual revenue has been harder to come by than the initial burst of attention.
Schiffmann said Friend’s investors are interested in sales, but he is more concerned about “being seen as someone who understands culture.” In the future, he added, he hopes people will look back on his ad campaign as a “ginormous art installation.”
Such offbeat attitudes toward marketing are increasingly normal, according to Dave McNamee, a digital marketer who designs online strategies for brands including Chili’s, Arby’s and Arizona Iced Tea. “It’s almost as if the product doesn’t matter as much as the response to the product,” he said.
Despite the brand risk of posting something in poor taste, McNamee said he often finds himself urging companies to go further in their efforts at online provocation. Think of it this way, he said: You see a house on fire but no one is paying attention. So you feed the fire and make it bigger until people start to notice.
“And everyone’s like, ‘Look how big this awful fire is!’” McNamee said. “But no one was talking about the fire until you poured that gasoline on it.”
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