As the 2024 U.S. presidential election enters its final stretch, you might think there could not possibly be more ads than there already are. You’d be wrong. One particularly bold approach comes from FTW PAC, a political action committee co-founded by friends Wally Nowinski and Matt Curry. Their out-of-the-box plan is to target a largely overlooked segment of the voting population: consumers of online adult entertainment, particularly young men, who watch ads before porn videos.
If you watch porn in a swing state in the final two weeks of the election, there’s a solid chance you might see an ad that starts with a woman enjoying herself on a bed before Donald Trump appears over her, or else a warning that “Trump’s Project 2025 will ban this video.” The ads conclude by telling the viewer, “Enjoy while you can.”
What began as a half-serious conversation between friends soon turned into a real advertising push. Originally, they joked about calling it “Porn PAC,” but rebranded to FTW PAC, deciding “FTW” could stand for “Freedom to Watch” or “For the Win,” to make it more palatable to prospective donors. I asked Nowinski about the unique challenges they faced, the opportunities this election presents, and how many people they expect to reach. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: Can you tell me about your PAC? How did you get the idea?
Wally Nowinski: This is the kind of idea that comes about BS-ing over drinks at a bar with a good friend. In this case, we finally followed through on one of those ideas. I have a background in politics and e-commerce—direct-to-consumer startup ads. And I was texting my friend Matt, who has a background in project management. He’s the one who got us from bar idea to “Why don’t we do this and make it happen?”
Why ads on porn sites?
I’ve long known that porn ad networks are extremely cheap—like 1,000 percent cheaper or more than YouTube or Hulu or whatever—because reputable brands won’t touch it. But that also means that they’re not very good ad networks. When advertising with Google or Facebook, you have access to all these useful tools to carefully measure and target everything. Porn sites don’t have many of these targeting features. You can’t even target on gender. Most of them don’t allow you to target by state, but I found one that does. And it’s really, really cheap.
It’s a good efficiency play. Like, if I gave $100 to the Harris campaign to put the ten-millionth ad on Sunday Night Football, am I really going to move the needle? But if I spend $100 on an adult ad site, I can get my message in front of 15,000 people in Pennsylvania. That return on investment really appealed to me. And then I thought that this election is a unique and interesting time to do it. Because the gender gap is just getting enormous.
How did you decide on the ad’s messaging?
There’s an interesting conflict point within the Republican Party. Trump does extremely well with non-college voters—he’s doing very well with white men. Trump really cleaned up in 2016 and 2020 in the upper Midwest, where they weren’t evangelical Christians or the Bush-era religious right. They were vaguely disgruntled dudes who liked that Trump was brash and going to stick it to the people who they didn’t like. But with the Barstool Sports bros, they’re not into progressive cultural politics, but they are also not into J.D. Vance’s weird shit—someone who thinks that it’s morally reprehensible that they’re not married yet with kids and who wants to ban adult entertainment.
Next, we backward engineered from the constraints on these websites. I was aware that lots of Republican state legislators were passing laws that in effect banned Pornhub. If you log on to Pornhub from a VPN out of Texas, you will get a message saying the website is not available because of whatever law. My initial idea was some sort of map, warning that voting Trump will empower legislators like this. But then they put Project 2025 out, which was a gift. It has a page detailing a plan to ban pornography and throw pornographers in jail. I was like, “OK, this will be a simple message.”
The trick was, with these sites, everyone is just ready to click skip. We’re running 10-second spots and have only five seconds before the skip button. The first half has the message “Trump’s Project 2025 is going to ban porn. Enjoy it while you can.” And the second half is “Google Trump porn ban.” Short and sweet. We’re not going to outcompete the other ads on adult websites in terms of shockingness or attention-grabbing-ness. What we wanted to do was be different. And what is more different on a porn site than clicking and instead of seeing—you know—it’s a picture of Donald Trump?
Are there any rules against running political ads you need to circumvent?
Actually, this was the hard part. There are other groups that have worked on this idea, but they’ve taken different approaches, like influencer marketing campaigns, because they ran into trouble getting their ads placed.
The issue is the biggest player in the space, Pornhub, is owned by a company called MindGeek. MindGeek, which is based in Montreal, owns Pornhub and a few similar sites, and they do not allow political ads. Lots of people who’ve looked into this are like, “OK, well, we can’t do it because they don’t allow it.” And yes, Pornhub doesn’t allow it, but there’s tens of millions of visits in the United States every day to other websites that are not owned by MindGeek. You just have to find an ad network that has access to that inventory that can sell you pre-roll ads, with state-level targeting, and that was actually tricky. It took me weeks to get approved, run trials, etc., and also make sure that it was real, that people clicking were actually in Pennsylvania, not some Russian ad-fraud network or something.
What feedback have you gotten on this campaign so far?
We’ve had good reception so far. I’ve spoken to people who were involved in other campaigns who get it instinctively. People are like, “Oh, that makes sense.” It’s novel. You’re hitting them with an ad at a very relevant time. It’s not like an ad during a football game, where you turned away, you put it on mute, or whatever. You’re waiting to see your thing, and the ad is highly relevant, so I expect it will be impactful. And it’s so cheap that you get a lot of eyeballs.
How many eyeballs do you expect when the campaign is over?
We think that there are 20 million users per day across the plausible swing states. And that’s if we played everywhere. A lot of men look at porn. This is us backward estimating based off of total volume to the United States, weighted by population and age demographics. It could be off a bit, but I don’t have any worry about inventory. I think we’re going to be able to reach millions of people with this.
Do you expect to run more ads in the future now that you’ve figured out how to do it?
I would like to. I’m super interested in ad arbitrage opportunities. We spend a lot of money on politics, but there’s vastly diminishing returns. If we can make this work on what I euphemistically call “subprime ad networks,” I’m interested in other ones. Our plan is just to run the last two weeks. If I had started this earlier and had a little bit more time, I have other ideas like gas station TVs, which are cheap and relevant, assuming that you have a message that works. Like, I wouldn’t run ads about blocking a pipeline or something.
Have you heard from anyone aligned with Kamala’s campaign?
The goal here is to defeat Trump. We don’t coordinate with the campaign because it’s a super PAC. But I don’t think, quite frankly, they would think it would be worthwhile to coordinate with somebody like me. The reason they’re not running ads on porn sites is because it’s reputational. What we’re doing is straight negative, trying to let Trump’s Barstool Sports bros know that they’re going after a hobby they might spend, on average, 70 minutes on a week.
