In a bid to influence a crucial block of voters in the days leading up to Tuesday’s presidential election, one super PAC is doing what countless PACs have done before—find likely voters where they are.
Except this group, the Freedom to Watch PAC, is trying to reach young men, and it’s headed to the places on the internet that many other advertisers usually avoid with a 10-foot pole: pornography sites.
In targeted ads running on “high-traffic” adult sites, the PAC is running pre-roll ads warning viewers about a GOP proposal to ban pornography should former President Donald Trump win the White House. The two short video ads tell viewers to “enjoy while you can” and instruct them to “google Trump porn ban”—a reference to a proposal outlined in the right-wing Heritage Foundation-published playbook Project 2025, a guidebook for a second Trump term, which argues that “pornography should be outlawed.”
Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, although he has ties to more than 100 individuals involved in its creation and authorship, according to CNN.
Millions and millions served: The ad campaign is an eyebrow-raising (and headline-producing) strategy, and Wally Nowinski, co-founder of FTW PAC, told Marketing Brew on Halloween that the ads had been played at least 6 million times on adult sites since rolling out in mid-October, and that the PAC aims to get another 5 million–6 million more views before Election Day.
Nowinski said the message is intended to resonate with what he described as the “Barstool bros” demographic.
Trump currently leads among men ages 18–29 who are “less certain to vote” 37% to 26%, according to a Harvard Youth Poll from late October. And young men, like many other groups, are consumers of adult content: 44% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 said they had watched porn in the last month, according to a 2022 report from the Survey Center on American Life, which is part of the right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute.
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“This is a population of people that is actually quite hard to target,” Nowinski said, later adding that “they might not be aware and not be happy about the very conservative agenda that the Project 2025 team and [vice presidential candidate] JD Vance are cooking up.”
Big (small) spenders: So far, the PAC spent $50,000 in the month of October and plans to spend another $25,000 by Election Day on targeted advertisements in swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, with the intention of reaching younger, non-college-educated white men, Nowinski said.
Pornhub, which is among the most popular porn sites in the US, doesn’t allow political advertisements, Nowinski said, but through what he described as “subprime ad networks,” he has been able to target viewers for CPMs that cost between $4.50 and $5, he said. Pornhub didn’t respond to a question about its advertising policy by time of publication.
“You can take advantage of extremely cheap ad rates,” he said.
Join the club: Not to be outdone, a group of adult entertainment industry performers has also entered the fray with an ad campaign of its own called “Hands Off My Porn,” centered around the same proposed ban.