Trevor Noah Made a Bunch of Secret YouTube Vidoes

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There are, traditionally, a lot of ways to promote your television show: billboards, bus signs, online ads, sponsored content, commercials during other television shows. But the folks behind the new version of The Daily Show came up with a decidedly clever way to introduce new host Trevor Noah—who had only appeared on the Jon Stewart-hosted iteration of the show a handful of times—to their Net-savviest viewers: via a series of “secret” YouTube videos.

The bits, discovered and reported by Uproxx, Splitsider, and Slate, were predicated on the assumption that people would be Googling the new Daily Show host. So Comedy Central bought a series of Google ads for Noah-related search terms (“Trevor Noah + [term]”), with those ads linking to unlisted YouTube videos, otherwise unlisted and unembeddable. According to Slate:

Uproxx discovered videos for “Trevor Noah Wiki,” “Trevor Noah Girlfriend,” “Trevor Noah Autotune,” “Trevor Noah ASMR,” “Trevor Noah Age,” “Trevor Noah Net Worth,” and “Trevor Noah Gay,” and SplitSider chimed in with “Trevor Noah Tweets,” “Trevor Noah Religion,” and “Trevor Noah Shirtless.” I uncovered “Trevor Noah Knitting,” “Trevor Noah Race,” “Trevor Noah Crocs,” “Trevor Noah Illuminati,” and “Trevor Noah Star Sign,” and doubtless there are dozens more waiting to be discovered.

Pretty clever stuff—though, as the AV Club points out, if we’re all just discovering these videos a week after Noah’s debut, maybe they were a bit too secret, eh?