FTW PAC ad | Screenshot
Go where the audience is.
It’s as basic a concept as there is in marketing, whether it’s for consumer goods or political advertising.
But for Wally Nowinski, a University of Michigan graduate and tech marketer, the audience he wanted to reach was in a very particular place: watching porn.
Wally Nowinski | Courtesy photo
The 39-year-old Nowinski, who grew up in Rochester Hills but now lives in California, and his friend, Matt Curry, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., teamed up to create their own super political action committee. FTW PAC has been running a 10-second ad on pornography websites with a photo of Donald Trump along with the statement: “Trump’s Project 2025 Will Ban Porn. Enjoy While You Can.” It then transitions to a black screen that simply says, “Google Trump Porn Ban.”
The former president, who is the GOP nominee, is seeking a second White House term against Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I’m targeting guys who don’t find the last 12 years of anti-Trump messaging from Democrats particularly persuasive,” Nowinski told the Michigan Advance. “If anything, they like that he is problematic or brash or whatever you want to call it. But they don’t know what [vice presidential nominee] J.D. Vance and Trump’s allies on Project 2025 are cooking up, and they might not be on board with that.”
Nowinski is referencing a section in the authoritarian policy plan prepared by the Heritage Foundation for a second Trump presidency that, among other things, calls for restricting access to reproductive health care, eliminating the Department of Education, and deploying the U.S. military against domestic protestors. However, one less-publicized proposal is to prohibit the creation and distribution of adult pornographic content.
“Pornography should be outlawed,” states the forward of Project 2025. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Nowinski says that’s a message that the mostly white, 20-somethings he is targeting have not heard.
“So, you have five seconds to get your message across before the skip button. I don’t anticipate many people are waiting to see the second five seconds of the ad, so I have time to get in one message, and so what I’m focusing on is to tell them something they didn’t know about Trump that is unique and relevant and negative to their interests.”
Nowinski calls the target audience “Barstool Bros,” as they share similar interests with the popular “Barstool Sports” website. He says the idea to reach them on porn sites, as opposed to more traditional advertising platforms, is born out of his experience as an online advertising consultant and fundraiser for Democratic causes before he moved into high tech.
“For the last decade, I’ve been in tech doing marketing, probably like a $100 million plus of digital ads, and I was aware that there is this other universe of what I will euphemistically call subprime ad platforms, that normal marketers don’t touch,” he said. “But a couple months ago, I was texting with my friend about the sort of enthusiasm and emerging gender gap that young white men seem to have for Trump more so than maybe they had for [former President] George W. Bush and I kind of cooked this idea up.”
Nowinski says while the overall audience is smaller than more traditional platforms, it is highly targeted, including by state, which gives it much higher value.
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“I could raise some money for Harris so that they could run the millionth ad on Sunday night football or whatever, or I could probably reach a lot more eyeballs with a novel message at a group that’s going to vote 65, 70% for Trump that they haven’t seen before,” he said.
FTW PAC, which Nowinski says stands for “Freedom to Watch,” has raised about $100,000 since they opened it in late August, although most of it has come in during the last few weeks.
Because it’s a super PAC, it can solicit and spend unlimited sums of money, but cannot coordinate its activities with a particular campaign. Nowinski says while he is a Harris supporter, he has not heard from the Harris campaign, nor does he expect to.
“We’re thrilled that people think that it’s novel and worth supporting, but this is this is really two people trying to do what they can for the election, and this seemed like something we had the expertise in terms of advertising to do that was novel, that the official campaign probably is not going to take on just because it’s porn,” he said.
Nowinski also believes this line of attack on the Trump campaign is essentially immune from any type of counter-programming, saying even with Trump going on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast on Friday, which has 14 million followers, any mention of the ads would be a win.
“If he goes on Rogan and talks about a porn ban, this will have been successful beyond my wildest dreams,” said Nowinski.
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