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Students use their heads to make some easy money
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Katie Yankura gets some weird stares from her classmates these
days. Everything about this freshman at Johnson & Wales
University seems normal – except, well, her forehead.
In one of the more unique advertising tricks to date, Yankura
works for Headvertise, a new marketing company that pays college
students to wear temporary, tattooed advertising messages on their
foreheads.
Yankura said the novel idea is turning heads on her Rhode Island
campus. “People come up to me all the time and ask about
it,” Yankura said. “Everyone is just amazed by
it.”
For her first campaign, Yankura advertised Roommates.com, a Web
site that specializes in matching people looking for roommates and
living space. Yankura said she chose the roommate service over href=”http://www.69gear.com” target=”_new”>69gear.com, an online clothing company.
Despite the weird stares and awkward looks, Yankura said she is
eager to do it again. “It’s a little embarrassing, but
you get used to it,” she said, adding that Clubzelis.com,
will be the next company featured on her face. Clubzelis.com bills
itself as “irresistible clothes for irresistible
women.”
Yankura said that she would be open to lots of companies
appearing on her body _ within reason. “It really
doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “But I am at
school so obviously some stuff, like things of a direct sexual
nature, wouldn’t work.”
For ages, college students have been known to engage in all
sorts of offbeat employment in order to help make ends meet,
including being used as guinea pigs for drug experiments and
donating blood to laboratories.
But the idea of wearing temporary tattoos for cash is uncharted
territory, according to Headvertise founder Justin Kapust. Also a
Johnson & Wales student, Kapust said Headvertise combines the
eternal need for money that college students encounter and regular
brand marketing – with a twist.
“When you go to Abercrombie and Fitch, you are spending
more money just because it has that brand. And then when you are
walking around you’re advertising their brand all the time
without getting paid,” Kapust said. “With our company,
people are finally getting paid for what they have always
done.”
Students were paid $70 a week for the first campaign. Kapust
said that wage is comparable to what you would earn working in
retail. “The only major difference is that you don’t
really have to do any work. It’s just there.” Kapust
hopes to increase the pay to more than $100 for future
campaigns.
Kapust acknowledges that being an employee of Headvertise forces
a student to do more than just wear a brand. Since the tattoo
cannot be removed for the duration of the campaign, the student is
a walking advertisement morning, noon and night.
But Kapust said that students who have tried it so far adjusted
quickly. “I know students feel awkward, but after the first
day most of them are feeling okay about it,” he said.
However, students who work other jobs might find that other
employers don’t like Headvertise’s style.
“That’s where it gets a bit iffy,” Kapust
said.
Yankura said that in addition to Headvertise, she also works
part-time at Aeropostale, a clothing store at the local mall. Store
management would not approve of the Headvertise tattoo.
“I would have to wear a hat or something to cover
up,” Yankura said. Though Headvertise approved a covering,
she lucked out and wasn’t scheduled to work during the first
campaign.
Work aside, Headvertise doesn’t interfere too much with
the rest of Yankura’s daily activities.
“I’m usually lazy and just wear my hair up anyway so
that’s not a problem,” Yankura said, though she
conceded that people who wear their hair down might look odd with
the imprints. Yankura also said that the tattoos are resilient and
don’t fall off in the face of water bombardment. “You
can still take a shower with it on. It will fade a little, but
it’s still okay.”
Kapust said the public’s response to Headvertise has been
mixed, making note of hate mail from people opposed to corporate
America. “But I think at the same time a lot of students are
starting to open up to this,” he said.
In the future, Kapust hopes students outside of Rhode Island
open up to Headvertise too. A deal for a West Coast version of
Headvertise is ready to go and that he hopes to expand to other
cities as well.
“We have four or five more companies in the works,”
Kapust said, mentioning that he hopes to bring Headvertise to the
cities of Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, as well as
California markets in the near future. “We are trying to keep
it at big schools right now,” Kapust added.
Bryan O’Keefe
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
