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Space for hire

Would you pay a guy $1 (or £0.60p at today’s exchange rate) to wear your branded t-shirt for a day?

Seems an odd question, but hundred’s of companies are apparently doing it.

Jason Sadler of iwearyourshirt.com has made $70,000 this year by selling ad space on the tshirts he wears, according to Mashable. Prices start at $1 for January 1st, $2 for January 2nd and so on until you get to $365 for December 31st. It’s working so well that he has sold out all of 2009 and the first four months of 2010. From next year the prices have doubled (outrageous price hike!), but you do get the benefit of his friend Evan wearing your t-shirt too.

Aside from the people he meets during the day, your t-shirt will get exposure on his blog, his Twitter and Facebook accounts, plus photos and a video show.

So is it worth it?

Well, the daily video blog runs on Ustream.tv, which reports his videos have been viewed over 129,000 times since 16th December 2008. He also distributes the video content to Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion among others. The top video on Youtube (below) was watched over 9000 times, though most sit around the 150-350 mark.

So there is plenty of exposure as a whole, but it’s debatable whether your single day of exposure and subsequent viewings will have much impact for you. But then we are only talking $1…

As an advertiser, I’m not convinced I would do it. Yes, it would be pretty easy to get a ROI, it would probably only take one person to visit your site or purchase your product to make the investment back. But in that scenario, it’s almost not worth the time to process the paperwork (unless of course you sell high price products). You probably have other more pressing projects that need your attention.

Where it would work, is if you could make the video of him wearing your t-shirt the one that reaches 9,000+ views and get it to prompt a whole series of purchases. For that to happen you’d probably need to have an extremely clever idea or giveaway, and utlise it as part of a larger campaign.

What really impresses me about this though, is the fact that it’s a great idea. Kudos to Jason for making this work. He’s come up with a really simple idea and found a way to make it work. And did I mention he made $70,000 wearing t-shirts? I do that for free. Actually no, I pay brands to wear their tshirts. I’m a mug.

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