Obama for America’s team, or some troublemaker, is buying YouTube InStream pre-roll ads on a video featuring nude pictures of Scarlett Johansson. The President’s paid “follow-me” pitch introduces soft-porn. This is a classic example of what can happen when demographic targeting is not carefully conceived and channels properly vetted.
Revenue from YouTube InStream ads is shared with the video’s publisher, so a percentage of every dollar Mr. Obama spends functionally subsidizes celebrity hacker-porn. Google, owner of YouTube, is the middleman.
We were watching MSNBC this morning and Scarlett Johansson’s cease and desist letters, surrounding the nude picture leak, was a top story. Being curious and not readily familiar with Ms. Johansson, we had a look to see how Google was handling things. The obvious search was for “Scarlett Johansson nude pictures.”
The pictures had already been removed from most sites. However, a bit down in the search engine results, there it was…a racy video posted on the Mahalo.com YouTube channel. Now there’s some “high quality” [cough] content, as Mahalo promises in their YouTube profile blurb.
Imagine our surprise to fine that a pre-roll advertiser on the video is none other than our Commander in Chief, President Obama [cough again].
President Obama is actually in fine company. Various Scarlett Johansson pic-videos are also fronted by YouTube “In-streaming” ads for other mainstream advertisers. Nike is a member of the Scarlett Johansson soft-porn advertising club.
So is NBC.
It must be some careless YouTube demographic targeting which resulted in a pre-roll ad for Beneful dog food. Bow wow!
President Obama is most likely not aware that someone is schilling his brand introducing hacked nude pictures of a celebrity via YouTube ad units. The big boss does not seem like that kind of guy, so perhaps he’ll have a word with whoever set up the ad’s demographic targeting.
