ChasNote

I was going to link to a piece in today’s NYT Week in Review, but the article to which I wanted to point you (”Place Your Ad Here, and Here”) doesn’t allow me to link to it. Oh well. I’ll point you to SF Gate instead!

The picture that caught my attention: The Salt Lake City woman who sold ad space on her forehead to GoldenPalace.com. (It happened last summer, but I missed it.) She posted the offer on eBay, and made $10,000 in exchange for persistent placement — sorry, I had to! — of their URL in 1-inch letters. Let’s see. She’s thirty. Say she lives to be 78 (call it 17,520 days, give or take) and walks past 50 people a day close enough that they can read the tattoo (876,000 impressions), that’s effectively an $11.42 CPM.

As efficient a marketplace as eBay is, I wonder if she might have done better hiring a freelance ad-sales rep with two-plus years of sales experience. Someone who could add a little sizzle to the pitch — y’know, to get some of that “irrational” premium that keeps media companies in business. But, hey, maybe she was just looking for an excuse to put a cool tat on her forehead!