Jobs Site Accidentally Places Ad on White Nationalist Podcast

If you did something silly today—like publicly revealing you were looking at hentai, for example—take comfort. You still did not fuck up as bad as the jobs website ZipRecruiter, which got ad time on an alt-right podcast this week, apparently by accident.

As first noted on Reddit, the advertisement was read on Wednesday’s episode of The Daily Shoah, a podcast on the white nationalist website The Right Stuff. Among other odious features, the site maintains a “lexicon” page defining some of The Right Stuff’s most used terms, like “cuck” (“a decent substitute for ‘faggot’”), “Dindu Nuffins” (“what it sounds like when a Basketball American attempts to say the phrase ‘He didn’t do nothing!’”), and “Niggertech” (“technology built not to improve lives, but to maintain mediocre ones”). “Shoah” itself is a Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

Nasty stuff! And yet, there the ad was, read out loud about 49 minutes into a recent episode of The Daily Shoah:

Well listen, these business owners having these problems, I mean... maybe if they had a good service available to them like, uh, ZipRecruiter, they, they wouldn’t, uh, run into these issues. They’d be able to find the help they need without any of these weird, these weird autistic arguments and things, so, you know.

[...]

Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job, find the best candidates? With ZipRecruiter, you can post your job to 100+ job sites with just one click, then their powerful technology efficiently matches the right people to your job, better than anyone else. That’s why ZipRecruiter is different. Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn’t depend on candidates finding you, it finds them. In fact, it finds over 80 percent of jobs posted on ZipRecruiter get a qualified candidate in just 24 hours. No juggling emails or calls to your office. Simply screen, rate, and manage candidates all in one place with ZipRecruiter’s easy-to-use dashboard. Find out today why ZipRecruiter has been used by businesses of all sizes to find the most qualified job candidates, with immediate results, and now our listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free, that’s right, free, just go to ZipRecruiter.com/TRS, that’s ZipRecruiter.com/TRS, one more time, try it for free, ZipRecruiter.com/TRS.

As late as Thursday afternoon, the promo page was still active, displaying the message “Welcome TRS RADIO Listeners!” when visitors entered the URL. After Gizmodo contacted ZipRecruiter for this story, the page was removed.

So how did this happen? Well, according to ZipRecruiter’s ad buyer, Ad Results Media, they didn’t mean to put ads on that TRS. The spot was supposed to air on TRS Radio, a sports podcast about triathlons.

In a statement to Gizmodo, a partner at at Ad Results Media provided this account of the error:

Last month Ad Results Media placed an advertising buy for a sports podcast for one of our clients. Unfortunately, we ended up contacting and booking this particular podcast that had the same name (TRS) as the sporting podcast we intended to book. This is an isolated incident where we bought ad time on the wrong podcast out of two that had the same name. To be clear – our client did not request or approve this podcast and it has been canceled effective immediately. In no way did we intend to book this particular podcast and in no way do we condone or support their content as an organization or on behalf of any of our clients. We take full responsibility for this isolated incident.

In a follow-up phone conversation, the partner said the mistake “went under the radar and we all missed it,” attributing the mistake to a “junior ad buyer” who contacted the wrong website after making a Google search. He also said The Right Stuff did not receive any payment for the ad. A ZipRecruiter representative told Gizmodo that no one signed up using the promo code.

Asked for comment by Gizmodo, The Right Stuff made light of the incident in a series of sarcastic, anti-Semitic emails.

“I can imagine one thinking it’s odd that [ZipRecruiter executives] Ian Siegel and David Travers would want to tacitly support a political show so far and away from what they believe in as individuals,” wrote Daily Shoah host Jesse Dunstan. “I’m proud to work with them.”

Presumably, the feeling is not mutual.