It went as quickly as it came.

On Tuesday, mayoral contender Vince Gray’s campaign rolled out a YouTube ad in which Mayor Adrian Fenty is seen apologizing to an irate resident for apparently not doing his job. The implication of the ad was clear — Fenty has fallen short, especially with the District’s neediest residents. Today, that ad is gone, pulled from YouTube.

But why would a campaign short on money and time pull one of two ads — the other is on radio — that they rolled out just this week?

It seems that the folks over at NBC4 didn’t think too highly of the ad, which relied on footage from a report by reporter Tom Sherwood. But using clips of news footage isn’t anything new, especially not for political campaigns. The problem may have been that the ad’s first voiceover came not from an anonymous paid campaign speaker, but was rather culled from Sherwood’s report itself, giving the awkward impression that the dean of local political reporters had thrown his lot in with Gray.

Both Sherwood and the Gray campaign confirmed that the decision to pull the ad came from station management and wasn’t met with much of a fight from the campaign. “The station management objected to the unauthorized use of NBC4 news video/sound in the Gray campaign ad,” Sherwood told us. A Gray campaign official told DCist via email that, “[w]hile we feel that we have every legal right to air it, in the spirit of cooperation we took it down.”

As for the use of Sherwood’s voice? “I was not directly involved in that management decision, but it was jarring to hear myself in a political ad,” said Sherwood.

Hat tip goes to TBD.com’s Kevin Robillard, who tweeted about Gray’s absentee YouTube ad earlier this afternoon.