ELI5: How does Marc Lou’s Sponsor My Body work?

Marc Lou's Sponsor My Body experiment works like a small sponsorship auction where different areas of one person's body become separate advertising spaces.

Marc divided his body into multiple available placements. A brand could choose the area it wanted to sponsor and pay for that position.

The unusual part was the bidding system.

Bids originally started at $1,000. If another company wanted a placement that had already been purchased, it had to pay double the previous amount. The displaced sponsor would then be refunded, minus applicable payment-processing fees.

That means a desirable position could theoretically move from $1,000 to $2,000, then $4,000, $8,000 and so on.

When bidding closed, the winning brands kept their respective sponsorship placements, with their logos intended to appear as temporary tattoos during Marc's HYROX event.

A marketplace does not necessarily need to use the same auction system.

For example, an athlete on SponsorMyBody.com could eventually offer something much simpler:

Left upper arm — HYROX race day — €300

A brand could then review the person, event, placement and included deliverables before deciding whether to sponsor it.

That turns the original one-person experiment into a sponsorship model that could potentially be used by many different athletes and creators.