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Oxford Dictionary just revealed its official word of 2025. Its rage bait. According to an official announcement post, Oxford Dictionarys team of lexicographers choose a shortlist of potential words each year by analyzing data and trends to identify new and emerging words and expressions, which our lexicographers think of as a single unit, and examine the shifts in how more established language is being used. This years final contenders were aura farming, biohack, and rage bait. In the end, 30,000 members of the public voted for their top choices, and Oxford chose rage bait as the winner. Per the Oxford Dictionarys editors, rage bait is defined as: Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account. This year, rage bait has emerged as both a silly trend on platforms like TikTok and a legitimate marketing tactic for companies attempting to stand out onlineand its a perfect encapsulation of the digital landscape in 2025. What is rage bait? Based on Oxford Dictionarys analysis, the term rage bait was first used online more than 20 years ago, in a 2002 posting to Usenet. In its earliest form, rage bait referred to a drivers reaction to being flashed at by another driver requesting to pass. Since then, Oxfords post reads, the word has evolved into internet slang used to describe viral tweets, often to critique entire networks of content that determine what is posted online, like platforms, creators, and trends. In the last 12 months alone, online use of the phrase rage bait has tripled. On platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, describing something as rage bait has become a silly trend that frequently rakes in millions of views. For example, a creator might purposefully rage bait their parents on Thanksgiving by stating obvious facts as revelations or poking fun at their political views; rage bait their partner by asking purposefully ridiculous questions; or even rage bait their cat by interrupting their grooming process. In the real world, rage bait has also emerged as a genuine strategy that some companies rely on to catch potential customers attention in an overcrowded marketing landscape. How rage bait has become a popular marketing tactic Shock value marketing isnt a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. But our current era of political and technological divide has opened the door for companies to try a new kind of attention-seeking provocation. This genre of rage bait marketing takes advantage of online algorithms, which are engineered to prioritize content that generates emotions like fear and rage to break through the deluge of content that users are looking at on a daily basis. As Oxford Dictionary explains: [Its a] proven tactic to drive engagement, commonly seen in performative politics. As social media algorithms began to reward more provocative content, this has developed into practices such as rage-farming, which is a more consistently applied attempt to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait. Examples of this trend include Nucleus Genomics, a genetic health company that recently debuted an ad campaign starring phrases like, Have your best baby and These babies have great genes; Friend AI, an AI wearable company that purposefully left blank space in a recent ad campaign to encourage vandalism; and even The New York Times, which, as Fast Company writer Joe Berkowitz explains in a recent analysis, has increasingly relied on inflammatory headlines to stoke readership. Elizabeth Paul, chief brand officer at the award-winning advertising company the Martin Agency, told Fast Company last month that rage bait marketing, unfortunately, makes a certain kind of sense for brands that are threatened by our increasingly crowded digital landscape. The reality is, according to Kantar, 85% of ads right now fail to meet the minimum threshold of attention for comprehension, Paul said. In other words, they are so bland and boring and invisible that people did not pay enough attention to even process what they said. In an environment like that, brand invisibility is a bigger threat than brand rejection.
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump has commuted the prison sentence of former investment manager David Gentile, who was convicted of defrauding investors the latest in a series of clemency actions Trump has taken in white-collar criminal cases.Gentile had reported to prison on Nov. 14, just days before Trump commuted his sentence, according to a White House official who requested anonymity to provide details of the clemency action. Gentile had been the CEO and co-founder of GPB Capital, which had raised $1.6 billion in capital to acquire companies in the auto, retail, health care and housing sectors.He had been sentenced to seven years in prison after an August 2024 conviction for his role in what the Justice Department at the time described as a scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors by misrepresenting the performance of three private equity funds.But the White House official said GPB Capital had disclosed to investors in 2015 that their capital might go to pay dividends to other investors, which the White House said undercut claims that the company had engaged in a “Ponzi” scheme in which new investments are used to reimburse previous investors.The government has agreed to no restitution in the criminal case, though various civil cases are handling repayments and damages to investors. Josh Boak, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The Salt Lake City Olympics planned for 2034 are now the Utah Games after organizers announced a new logo and name to reflect the multi-community work that goes into hosting the largest winter sports event on Earth. The state’s Governor, Spencer Cox, says the new logo has united peoplethough not in a good way. “It’s really brought people together because everyone seems to not like it,” Cox said at a recent press conference. [Image: Utah 2034] The new logo is temporary until the final emblem of the Games is released in 2029. It spells out “Utah” in irregularly shaped characters (does that say “IJTAH?”) that are stacked on top of “2034.” Its launch color palette is just black and white. Cox called the logo bold. “I’m a little old-fashioned and it’s certainly a bold logo,” he said. The comment section of one local Utah news site included reviews like “beyond terrible,” “a marketing disaster,” and “unreadable.” Some don’t like the name change that leaves out Salt Lake City. “It hurts,” Salt Lake County Mayor Erin Mendenhall told The Salt Lake Tribune. [Image: Utah 2034] A starting point, not a finish line This bare-bones logo, though, is just the beginning of what will become an expansive visual brand expressed across venues, apparel, and more. It’s a starting point, not a finish line. “I think that Olympics are uniquely a moment to do something new and different. And yet, many Olympics have bland and forgettable design,” Doug Thomas, an associate professor at Brigham Young University’s Department of Design and author of Never Use Futura, tells Fast Company. “Personally, I like that the Utah 2034 design team are swinging for the fences and trying something new and memorable.” [Image: Utah 2034] Utah organizers say the International Olympic Committee (IOC) allows for “transition logos” to “help the host regions build early awareness and momentum,” but they’re limited to typography only. The Utah 2034 mark, then, is a chance to introduce shapes through letters and numbers alone, the beginnings of a geometric visual language that could one day be revealed in a full Olympics brand expression. Just as the “Chrystal Rhythm” pattern of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games appeared in the snowflake-like Chrystal logo and was repeated across assets like venue signage and the iconic jackets worn by volunteers, the shapes in the letterforms of the Utah 2034 mark could well be repeated in future expressions of the brand. “The typography is recognizable, it is distinctive, and as such, opens space to create new meaning,” Thomas says. “The visual forms may not work in every application, but for a transition team logo, this is excellent as a starting point.” [Image: Utah 2034] Brand inspiration Organizers say the shapes of the letters in the logo were inspired by Utah’s landscape. It’s most noticeable in the stylized A designed to evoke southern Utah’s Delicate Arch. Other characters were drawn to resemble rivers, mountains, canyons, and petroglyphs, and one can imagine these same angles and shapes showing up in Olympic pictograms that denote sports and venues. [Image: Utah 2034] The letterforms are monospaced and laid out on a grid. Inspired by the urban grids that Mormon pioneers laid out in cities across Utah and the American West in the late 1800s, it gives the otherwise unusual logo a sense of balance. The logo was designed by a project team led by Molly Mazzolini, cofounder of the Salt Lake City design studio Elevate Creative. As for the name change, Salt Lake shouldn’t take it personally. Cox, the governor, says naming the Games for Utah instead of Salt Lake City was a decision made following decades of feedback from other cities and counties in the Salt Lake metro area that also hosted events during the 2002 Games but didn’t get credit. But it’s also aligned with the recent trend of Winter Olympics naming themselves after multiple cities or a region instead of a single city. The 2026 Milano Cortina Games are named for both Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy as they’re being held across a wide region, and they 2030 Games are named for the French Alps. In Utah, where events will be held from Provo to Park City, organizers are going with the state name. And by embedding the geography of Utah into the very letters of their new logo, designers found a creative way to begin telling Utah’s story in just a few characters.
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E-Commerce
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