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  1. Spotlight on Policy
  2. Elections
27 April 2010updated 05 Oct 2023 8:51am

David Cameron pops up on BNP video

The perils of Google Ads.

By Jason Stamper

BNP leader Nick Griffin’s latest party political broadcast was odd enough when it featured a Marmite jar – don’t ask – but that’s as nothing to the latest YouTube juxtaposition: the same video with David Cameron’s head in the opposite corner.

The Tories appear to have upped their campaign spending on video web site YouTube, with the somewhat disconcerting result that David Cameron’s head pops up in an advert along the bottom of Nick Griffin’s latest video.

 

As well as adverts embedded on various videos, the Tories look to have paid for top ranking in a number of search results on YouTube including for the terms “Labour Party”, “Conservative Party” and “Tories”.

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It would be interesting to know how the Tories’ spending on YouTube compares with its spend on other advertising channels. The YouTube demographic in the UK is overwhelmingly young males: the biggest group, at 40 per cent, are aged between 18 and 24, while 72.7 per cent are male.

As a colleague wrote in an article back in February this year, the Labour Party on the other hand seems to have spent more time targeting women voters.

Meanwhile anyone searching for Nick Griffin’s moment of Marmite madness could instead find themselves with a very different decision over what to love and what to hate.

As for the video that the Tories have paid to appear at the top of various search results, if they really wanted to target the YouTube generation effectively they’d give top billing to a video of Cameron falling off a skateboard in a dramatic “wipe-out”, not simply talking to camera in front of a climbing frame. Someone’s getting their audiences mixed up, surely?

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