The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2023–2024
Anti-Choice Ads targets anti-abortion viewers and funds medication on every skip
Pro-choice pre-rolls aimed at anti-choice YouTube viewers turn the skip button into an automatic donation for abortion medication
Mayday Health · Wisp · Abortion Freedom Fund · Plan C
What it had to solve
Pro-choice organisations were mostly reaching people who already agreed with them, while viewers who oppose abortion rarely saw a pro-choice argument at all. The campaign set out to break through internet bubbles and put a pro-choice message in front of exactly that audience, on a platform where that audience could be selected directly.
How it works
Pro-choice messaging was living inside a bubble: the people who already supported abortion rights saw it, and the people who opposed them almost never did. Anti-Choice Ads used YouTube's own targeting tools to reach an anti-choice demographic with pre-roll advertising, putting a pro-choice argument directly in front of viewers who did not believe in the right to choose.
The ad's structure turned rejection into funding. The viewer was offered a choice: watch the spot, which might open their mind to something new, or press skip — and every skip automatically funded abortion medication for someone in need. Mayday Health, Wisp, Abortion Freedom Fund and Plan C were the commissioning clients behind the campaign.
The effect is built into the mechanism: the least sympathetic viewer still does the most useful thing by leaving, because their skip is what pays for the medication. Rather than measuring success only by who watched, the campaign made the act of refusing the message itself productive.
The work was kept in the D&AD awards archive as a digital-marketing entry, an industry record of the idea rather than a sales figure.
Why it lands
- Using YouTube targeting to reach an anti-choice demographic put the message where pro-choice arguments were structurally absent.
- Framing the pre-roll as a literal choice — watch, or skip — mirrored the issue at stake and made every response meaningful.
- Tying the skip action to abortion funding meant the audience's rejection became the donation, so even hostile viewers advanced the cause.
- The simple binary interaction (watch or skip) was easy to understand, which let a political argument travel inside an everyday ad mechanic.
What it did
The mechanic converts rejection into support: the viewer's skip is what pays for medication, so the campaign raises money precisely from the people least likely to agree with the message. The idea earned a place in the D&AD awards archive as a digital-marketing case, and the archive credits the four health and advocacy clients behind it.
What you can take
An ad can be engineered so even rejection advances the cause: make the skip button do the work the audience refuses to do.
Since then
The D&AD archive records the campaign with Mayday Health, Wisp, Abortion Freedom Fund and Plan C as clients, though the entry publishes no donation totals or view counts. What survives is the structural idea: an advertising mechanic that captures value from the very action advertisers normally count as a loss. By making the skip button a donor, the campaign showed that an advocacy message can be engineered so that disagreement with it still funds the cause.
Sources
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