I finally got a link to the scariest ad on YouTube
This ad has been plaguing me on the PS5 YouTube app for what feels like an entire calendar year.
I do not like how the attendant walks straight at you in slow motion while smiling. I just do not like it. I find this person scary, mostly because the image seems highly modified digitally. I don't know. Not a fan. I have actually had nightmares about this ad. It really sucks!
The one upside to hunting for this video is that I have now figured out how to find the YouTube video links of the ads I have seen. To find them: click on the circle icon for your account image on the top right hand corner of the YouTube web page. You will see a dropdown menu; click on the "my data in YouTube" link. Currently, that takes me here. There, you will find a page section titled "YouTube Watch History" which contains ALL your watched videos, INCLUDING ALL ADS.
Whenever I talk about deranged YouTube ads with certain people in my life, they're only eager to tell me about how they have not seen any YouTube ads in ages because they're blocking them on devices where that is possible. Well, I almost only watch YouTube on my console, so I'm cursed to see this shit. I frequently find myself struck by how weird or unpleasant an ad is and then spend forever searching online to find it, usually with no luck. Google goes out of its way to conceal youtube ad content from video search results, and Kagi, the search engine I pay for, isn't any better at finding them.
I can appreciate that Google is hiding straight-up ads from most searches, since ads are not generally "useful information," but I kind of wish that searching "youtube advertisement virgin atlantic" would actually show me the advertisements that Virgin has paid to run on YouTube. Oh well! I probably should have intuited sooner that I would have better luck looking at my YouTube data page. You can also find Facebook ads in a similar way - there was a period of time where I was regularly browsing the ad pages for certain shovelware CYOA game companies on Facebook to watch their deranged ads for my own entertainment. I should probably write a blog post about that, too...