Your Brand, His Chest
At the height of the dot-com frenzy, san francisco taqueria Casa Sanchez offered free burritos for life to
anyone who'd get a tattoo of their logo. Forty tattoos later, they had to cut off the promotion. Surfing the wave of social media frenzy, Jason Sadler, a Jacksonville, Fla., Web designer, may not be permanently stamping his body, but he is selling advertising rights to his chest - in the form of a company's logo T-shirt. Every day in 2009, he will wear a different shirt, selling off torso space for a price that rises by the day: January 1 sold for $1, and December 31 sold for $365. (By mid-April, he had sold out 90 percent of his inventory.)
"Lying in bed at 3 a.m., I realized that something I do every single day, that I could possibly charge people for, that would be easy, is wearing a shirt," Sadler says. Which is not to say it isn't work. Sadler reinforces the on-skin placement by posting daily videos and photos of his outfits, interacts with fans on Facebook and Twitter, and does a daily live videocast. Logos also appear on iwearyourshirt.com. The CPMs aren't bad, either. In its first month 2009, iwearyourshirt.com got over 55,000 unique visitors and 31,000 people watched his video streams.
Sadler doesn't presume to act as a pitchman for the product, but he will try to engage his audience with something relevant to the brand. "Some companies tell me, 'Just live your life.' Others send a huge email with pages of talking points," he says. "I try and do something in between."
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