The “human advertising trend,” which involves the selling of parts of one’s bodies or personal items to advertisers has been around for quite sometime. Mostly, initial examples were one-offs followed by many unsuccessful followers. Mostly, they were laughed at because, well, it wasn’t “real” advertising. Now, with most forms of advertising in upheaval or on the brink of failure, marketers are much more receptive to trying new things.
This receptiveness has allowed web designer Jason Sadler’s I Wear Your Shirt to be well on it’s way to a complete success. With I Wear Your Shirt, an in the flesh-style PayPerPost, Sadler, 26, will wear a company’s shirt for one day every day next year. Off to s good start, 145 days have been sold so far.
Sadler has attractively priced his offering with each day sold at “face value.” In other words, January 1st costs $1 and so on. Most days through April have been sold to date. Sadler stands to make as much as $66,795 if he sells all 365 days.
In addition to wearing an advertiser’s shirt for the entire day, Sadler will create a daily video and upload it to YouTube and Ustream, he’ll place photos on the I Wear Your Shirt blog and Flickr, he’ll write a post on the blog and Twitter and he’ll place the company’s logo on the 12 month calendar on I Wear Your Shirt. Additionally, Sadler is happy to hand out company material for each day’s individual advertiser.
As with all ideas such as this one, it’s spawned several copy cats. The first was Jenae Plymale, who launched Girl in your Shirt. Like Sadler, she’ll wear the shirts for a day and create videos talking about the advertiser.
Also jumping on the trend is In Your Band Shirt, a site which will do the same thing for musicians.
Sadler, like the initial Million Dollar Hompage dude, Alex Tew, is likely to see complete success. No doubt, there will be a long line of followers. Though, given what’s going on in the business today, it’s quite likely many followers will see success as well.
Initial ideas like this always get press and tend to do well. The continued success of these ideas is another thing entirely. What we need now is some entrepreneur to come in an create a network for individuals who have an “audience.” Henry Copeland’s BlogAds and Ted Murphy’s IZEA (among many more) are doing it for bloggers. Who’s to doubt some entity will soon have half the nation wearing an Adrants t-shirt on the same day?
