01:00 AM EDT on Monday, May 16, 2005
In Omaha, an enterprising 20-year-old Web designer named Andrew Fischer recently auctioned off the use of his forehead as advertising space on eBay. The winning bidder, a company promoting a snoring remedy, paid Mr. Fischer $37,375 for the privilege of placing a bright-red temporary tattoo on Mr. Fischer's forehead for a month to advertise its product.
On the one hand, calling attention to Andrew Fischer and his $37,375-a-month forehead space (which, by the way, is more than the average working American earns in a year) is irresistible. It is a rare Zeitgeist moment, marking a new low in our already depressingly commercialized lives.
In a world where we are bombarded day and night by commercial messages -- where advertising springs from billboards and buses and a thousand other places we encounter in daily life -- it is finally staring us in the face. And because Mr. Fischer is among the first to explore the novel area of headvertising, he has attracted much media attention. Fischer and his forehead have appeared on ABC's Good Morning America, Fox TV's Fox and Friends, and now in these pages.
Yet to call attention to Mr. Fischer's pioneering space rental is also to prove that it works, and, by extension, to encourage others to do the same. The company that advertised on Mr. Fischer's forehead got far more exposure than $37,375 usually buys. Does this mean that we will soon see more human-body advertising? (Fischer, who has started a business at HumanAdSpace.com, sure hopes so.)
Yet if it does catch on, body advertising will soon lose its power to shock, to generate news -- just like every other new and different advertising gimmick that has come before. Then what? As Mary Hilton, a spokeswoman for the American Advertising Federation, has told BrandWeek magazine: "With the increased media clutter, capturing the imagination of consumers is getting more and more challenging. Smart marketing teams are trying all sorts of new things to reach their audience."
Who knows what new and exciting ways marketers will next find to attract our ever attenuated and addled attention by invading our personal space?
-- Lee Drutman
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/projo_20050516_cthead.202a979.html
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