For my strategic marketing course this semester, my team has to lead a discussion about nontraditional forms of advertising and promotion. This would be such a piece of cake, if there weren’t a catch. You see, another group has to lead a discussion about marketing on the web. Our nontraditional marketing mediums must be offline. (Seriously? What is offline these days, anyway?)

I thought that this project might make for some interesting blog posts and sure enough…here is the first (of many, I’m sure).

I spent an entire day thinking about what forms of nontraditional media exist outside of the internet. (It’s a little sad, I know!) And then it dawned on me…I vaguely recalled a news story of someone selling advertising space on their body. One google search later and LeaseYourBody.com is on my nontraditional advertising radar.

LeaseYourBody.com allows leasers (or regular people) to create profiles telling advertisers why their body would make the perfect advertising medium. Leasers also get to choose the price tag for their different body parts and list which body parts are not for lease!

So how many people see this as a viable marketing medium? Not very many. The most recent press covering Lease Your Body’s unique operation dates back to 2005! It also appears that their website has not been updated in quite some time. I clicked over to their forums to see if I could find some leasers who might have stuck around, but the newest post was from May of this year and it had no replies.

So now the burning question is, why did leaseyourbody.com fail? Or, better stated, why does it appear to be failing?

My first thought was about how ironic it would be if the company’s failure was due to ineffective marketing. More research showed that there was no other company out there serving as a middle man for people looking to lease out advertising space on their bodies and advertisers looking to buy the space. (I had no other successful marketing campaigns to compare it to.) It looks like there is just not a lot of demand for this niche service.

And so now the question is, why is an advertisement on someone’s forehead not effective? I will be the first to admit that I would be looking that company up on my iPhone before I even fully passed the guy (or girl!) wearing the temporary tattoo on his (or her) forehead/neck/arm. I have yet to find any research on the topic, but I’d love to hear your opinions on why this was/is a failure!