• by Shankar Gupta , February 28, 2005

Cody Love was surfing the Web to find a design for his first tattoo. The 20-year-old Suzuki-enthusiast from Port Albernie, Canada, thought he'd have to drop a chunk of change to get a quality tattoo, until he saw an ad for TatADs.com. The site enables people to get tattooed and get paid for it.

The site, founded and run by Mark Chadwick, pairs enthusiastic supporters with the companies they love. The idea is, if someone's already excited and talking about a brand, what better way to reinforce that excitement than by tattooing the logo of the company on the supporter's body?

That's exactly what Chadwick did for Love, who was paid $1,000 in Suzuki merchandise for tattooing the logo of the Orca Bay Suzuki dealership on his wrist. "All my friends have got tattoos and this is my first one, so they all thought it was a good idea, and they spent $300 bucks for all of theirs, but I'm getting paid for mine," Love says.

TatADs.com aims to pair brand enthusiasts, like Love, with the companies they support, so they can serve as living advertisements and promoters. "Everything I own is Suzuki. I have a Suzuki car, motorbike, quad, and an old-style Suzuki jeep," Love says.

What kind of people can sponsors hope to find on the site? "It's the broadest spectrum of people you can ever imagine. We've got beautiful women to bikers who are already covered with tattoos to successful business people," Chadwick says.

Love says that because his tattoo is in a prominent place, he ends up talking about it quite a bit. "It's right on my wrist. Whenever I reach for anything, everyone can see it, and they're always asking about it," he says. "I tell the whole spiel to everybody. They all think it's pretty neat, too." Shankar Gupta