Marketers used to sell products. These days, they sell meltdowns.
The Washington Post just ran a report exposing what anyone with eyes already knew: Major brands have stopped trying to persuade customers and instead court notoriety as a substitute for relevance.
Call it “buzz.” Call it “engagement.” The corporate bug people quoted in the piece call it “impactful.”
But the truth is simpler.
And it works the same way every time.
The Current Year marketing department is a behavioral economics sweatshop built around dashboards that track spikes of human fury. What they can’t earn in trust or taste, they try to steal through provocation.
You’ve seen the pattern: A commercial built to offend half the internet before breakfast goes live, and the cycle begins. A few million comments flood the replies. Influencers weigh in. Reaction channels react to the influencers’ reactions. Screen shots inundate social platforms. For 36 hours, the brand is, in bug parlance, “part of the conversation.”
Then the spike collapses.
At that point, most normal people would feel embarrassed. But corporations aren’t people; they’re algorithms wrapped in legal paperwork. And the robot only understands that yesterday’s provocation is today’s dead air.
So they deploy the only measure they can: escalation.
We’ve explored this dynamic before. Every rage-bait post starts an invisible countdown clock. I call it the Outrage Marketing Egg Timer. It starts ticking as soon as the outrage campaign goes live. Once it rings, the stunt is over, and the only way to reset the clock is to post even louder and more outrageous rage-bait.
You can almost hear the ad copy writers behind these campaigns:
“The backlash is winding down! Quick, find a new grievance to poke.”
“The hot take channels are moving on. Up the shock factor!”
“Customers aren’t yelling anymore! Time to offend a different audience segment!”
And the marketing firms can’t stop. They’ve addicted their clients to rage spikes instead of sales, growth, or simple goodwill.
Even worse, getting the next spike always demands more escalation.
The Post piece inadvertently gives away outrage marketers’ game: Their campaigns are coping mechanisms.
Legacy brands are creatively exhausted. Their old customer bases are aging out or walking away. And their leadership is insulated by HR layers and boutique boardroom ideology. They have nothing stable to offer, so they slop out spectacle.
You might ask, “Don’t they see this alienates people?”
Of course they do.
What they can’t see is a way to compete on merit. All of the trust, competence, and quality they relied on is crumbling. So they’ve resorted to brute-force attention farming.
The marketing exec quoted in the article said the quiet part out loud: “If people are talking about you, you’re winning.”
But that is wrong. If people are talking about you because you poked them with a cattle prod, you’re just measuring your downfall in clicks per minute.
The only people still fooled by outrage marketing are the ones running it. Consumers have caught on. They scroll past the bait faster every month. The anger spikes shrink. Rage campaign lifespans shorten. The Egg Timer rings sooner with each cycle. Soon the marketers will have to push stunts so aggressive they risk regulatory blowback or total brand implosion.
Some already have. But corporate culture makes them do it anyway.
It’s the death spiral you get when the decision-makers are rewarded for noise instead of results. Their systems punish restraint while their metrics miss dignity. Meanwhile, they don’t measure whether anyone actually likes the product. So agitation becomes the product.
What’s sad is, the alternative isn’t complicated. But the companies embracing outrage bait do it because they think the internet requires it.
Meanwhile, the online creators who are building loyal audiences are doing the opposite:
respecting their readers
delivering consistent value
keeping promises
speaking like adults
standing for positives instead of pushing negatives.
No bot can fake that kind of integrity. Best of all, the authentic approach is evergreen; no egg timer.
That’s why newpub keeps rising while old institutions chasing diminishing return are caught in a death spiral.
Spectacle burns fast. Substance endures. And the folks who prop up their business on perpetual meltdowns are about to learn what happens when the Egg Timer hits zero.
Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.
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The Egg Timer metaphor captures something I've been noticing but couldn't quite articulate. What really stands out is the escalation problem. Once a brand commits to this strategy, there's no graceful exit, only doubling down. Its like watching companies optimize for visibility at the expense of memorability. I saw a campaign recently that generated tons of shares and takes, but when I asked coworkers a week later which brand it was, nobody remebered. The noise just becomes ambient static, and authenticity is the only signal that cuts thru.