Posted on September 17th, 2011

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.

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  • John

    Youtube demographic targeting is a joke. Even for massive campaigns with huge budgets, the last 7 days worth of data is minuscule compared to the volume not in the demographic bucket. I guess all marketers should be adding negatives like nude, porn, an any other explicit keyword to prevent this.

    Thanks for letting me know about Scarlett Johansson nude pics though. I’ll have to do some ‘research’ as well.