I Wear Your Shirt: Influencer Marketing Before Instagram
PR
We Wore the Shirts. The Internet Built the Audience.
I was walking around my backyard pool in Southern California when Jason Sadler called me.
He had heard about the internet projects I had helped turn into national stories, including One Red Paperclip and Hitch50. He wanted help becoming internet famous, too.
Then he told me his idea.
Companies would pay him to wear their T-shirts. He would put on a different shirt every day, take pictures, post on social media, make a video and talk about the company online.
The price would start low on January 1 and increase with every day of the calendar. Early dates were inexpensive. New Year’s Eve was the most valuable day of the year.
It sounded simple enough to explain in a sentence and strange enough to make people stop and ask questions.
That combination had worked before.
I told him I was in.
A Human Billboard With a Daily Story
Jason launched I Wear Your Shirt in 2009. During that first year, he was the person wearing the shirts. I worked behind the scenes on public relations and marketing, helping turn the unusual business model into a larger media story.
The internet noticed quickly.
The Guardian covered the business during its first month. Mashable profiled I Wear Your Shirt later that year. The idea was becoming much bigger than a man wearing a sponsored shirt.
It was a daily internet show disguised as an advertising company.
By the second year, I had joined Jason as a co-owner and partner. I led PR, handled a significant amount of the sales and became the West Coast shirt wearer.
Jason broadcast from Florida. I broadcast from Hollywood Beach in Oxnard, California.
We now had two time zones, two personalities, two daily shows and twice as many opportunities to do something ridiculous on behalf of a brand.
What Wearing the Shirt Actually Required
Wearing a shirt was the smallest part of the job.
Every morning started with a new company and a new assignment.
I would put on the day’s shirt, take a photo and publish it on Flickr. I would post it to Twitter and make it my new Facebook profile picture. Then I would start thinking about what kind of video we could make for the company.
Jason hosted his livestream around noon Eastern. When his show ended, mine began around 10 a.m. Pacific.
We talked about the brand, brought representatives onto the show and interacted with viewers in real time. People typed questions, jokes and suggestions into the live chat. I read their comments aloud and pulled them directly into the program.
Then we still had to make the daily video.
That meant developing an idea, finding a location, filming it, editing it, uploading it to YouTube and promoting it across our social channels.
The shirt was the sponsorship inventory. The real product was the daily creative work happening around it.
The Audience Was Part of the Show
This was before Instagram. It was before TikTok. “Creator economy” was not yet the name of an industry.
But the basic dynamics of today’s creator marketing were already there.
Our audience did not simply watch an advertisement. People commented, asked questions, suggested ideas, made jokes, joined our livestreams and helped determine where the show went next.
The brand could see the reactions happening in real time.
That made the experience feel less like product placement and more like a conversation among the sponsor, the creators and the audience.
Entrepreneur later described I Wear Your Shirt as a kind of reality television show for advertising. At its height, the project was producing hours of livestream programming, short YouTube videos, social posts and photography across several different shirt wearers.
Across its run, I Wear Your Shirt reportedly worked with more than 1,600 companies and generated more than $1 million in revenue.
The Brands Let Us Get Weird
We worked with startups, internet companies and household names.
Ustream bought shirts, bringing together two important chapters of my career. Before joining I Wear Your Shirt, I had helped Ustream turn the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam into an international media story. Now Ustream was buying time on a daily livestreaming business I co-owned.
Gary Vaynerchuk appeared on our shows. We wore shirts for his birthday, opened a bottle of Gary Vaynerchuk wine and made a video about his book, Crush It!
Pizza Hut sent us pizza, gave pizza to our livestream audience and used the campaign to support BOOK IT!, its childhood reading program. We made videos about books, including A Lesson With Loving Princess and a wonderfully chaotic reading video featuring Where the Wild Things Are and Go, Dog. Go!
Southwest Airlines provided flights and let us wear the brand while traveling.
7 For All Mankind paid us to wear its jeans, which was a funny and logical expansion for a company built around wearing shirts.
Shake Weight did not pay us. It was simply too perfectly ridiculous for the internet to ignore, so we made content with it anyway.
We worked with companies including Pizza Hut, Nissan, Citrix, Chegg, Kayak, Zappos, Doritos, Pepperidge Farm and many more.
Each sponsor started with the same basic product: a person wearing its shirt.
What happened after that depended on how far we could stretch the idea.
Nissan Handed Me the Keys to a Car That Wasn’t Available Yet
The Nissan Juke campaign remains one of the wildest examples of how much trust brands placed in us.
The Juke had not yet been released in the United States. Nissan gave Jason and me each one of the only available vehicles in the country and asked us to introduce it to our audiences.
I was living on Hollywood Beach in Oxnard, California. One day, a vehicle transporter came down toward the beach carrying a brand-new Nissan Juke. It had fewer than 100 miles on it.
I signed a piece of paper. The driver unloaded the car, handed me the keys and left.
Suddenly, I had a new car for the week and a responsibility to make the internet care about it.
There was no conventional commercial shoot or carefully controlled test-drive route. The car became a character in the daily I Wear Your Shirt show.
I took it onto the wet sand near my house and made a video called Test Driving a Nissan JUKE on the Beach.
We also made Good Looking Nissan Juke, another playful piece of content built around giving the audience a closer look at the unusual new vehicle.
Then I decided to ghost ride it.
Ghost Riding a Pre-Release Nissan Juke
“Ghost riding the whip,” letting a car roll while the driver danced or walked beside it, was already part of internet and hip-hop culture.
So I found an Oxnard strawberry field where I could film my own version with Nissan’s unreleased car.
The resulting video, Ghost Riding a Nissan JUKE, was ridiculous, timely and completely native to the internet of that moment.
Nissan may not have loved every driving decision. I remember conversations about removing some of the more questionable footage. But people watched it, shared it and talked about the car.
That was the assignment.
Fast Company covered Nissan’s strategy under the provocative headline “Nissan’s Social Media Strategy: Hire ‘Nobodies.’”
Jason and I were not movie stars, professional race-car drivers or traditional celebrity endorsers. We were internet personalities with a growing daily audience, an existing relationship with that audience and permission to experiment.
Nissan gave two creators access to a fascinating product and let us make something unpredictable with it.
The three videos capture the campaign better than any retrospective can:
The campaign worked because we did not simply park the Juke behind us while talking to a camera.
We took the product into our lives, made it part of the show and created several different stories around it.
Today, that would be described as a creator-led product launch. Back then, we were figuring out what the internet would find fun enough to watch.
The Time I Tore My ACL for the Internet
The daily format created constant pressure to make the next video bigger, stranger or more entertaining than the previous one.
Sometimes we took that too far.
During one sponsored day, I went skydiving while wearing the company’s shirt. The footage is still online in a video called Skydiving Saturday.
I tore my ACL.
Even the injury became part of the show. I later made videos about doing ACL rehabilitation on the stairs and going through surgery.
That is probably not the creator-marketing best practice I would recommend today.
But it illustrates how completely the project consumed our lives. There was always another shirt to wear, another livestream to host and another video to make.
There was no content calendar with six weeks of approvals.
Tomorrow’s sponsor was arriving tomorrow.
We Were Building Influencer Marketing Before It Had a Name
The model now looks familiar.
A company paid creators who had built a relationship with an audience. We incorporated the product into our existing content instead of interrupting that content with a conventional commercial. The audience could respond directly, and the sponsor received photography, video, livestream exposure, social posts and measurable interaction.
We were doing branded content, influencer marketing, livestream commerce, audience participation and creator-led product launches before those ideas became separate line items in a marketing budget.
The internet was still fragmented. Facebook pages, Flickr albums, Twitter conversations, Ustream broadcasts and YouTube videos all served different purposes.
Our job was to connect those pieces into one day-long experience for the sponsor.
Years later, The New York Times revisited the human-billboard business model. By then, the larger creator economy was taking shape. Individuals were becoming media companies, and their relationships with audiences were becoming valuable commercial assets.
We had already lived through an early, frantic version of that future.
Public Relations Was Built Into the Product
My role was not limited to appearing on camera.
I was a partner, co-owner and head of PR. I helped sell sponsorships, develop the stories, pitch journalists and turn the daily activity into a larger conversation about the future of advertising.
The media coverage was not separate from the product. It was part of the growth model.
A strange business idea attracted journalists. The coverage attracted viewers. The viewers made the sponsorships more valuable. Bigger brands created better stories, and those stories attracted more coverage.
That loop allowed I Wear Your Shirt to become larger than the shirts themselves.
It is the same principle I still use in my PR work today: build something people can experience, document it well and give the media and the market a reason to talk about it.
The Ending Was Complicated
I do not want to rewrite the ending into something cleaner than it was.
When Jason expanded I Wear Your Shirt to five shirt wearers, we moved in different directions. I left feeling that I had not received a fair share of what I helped build, and Jason and I do not speak today.
That remains disappointing.
But I also do not want the ending to erase what the project was or what we accomplished together.
We built a real business around a beautifully simple idea. We helped more than 1,600 companies tell their stories. We generated more than $1 million in revenue. We produced thousands of videos, photos, broadcasts and social posts. We worked with major brands and helped demonstrate what a creator-led marketing campaign could become.
Both parts of the story can be true.
The ending can hurt, and the work can still matter.
What I Carry From I Wear Your Shirt
I Wear Your Shirt taught me that audiences respond to commitment.
We did not wear a sponsor’s shirt, post once and disappear. We spent the day making the company part of a larger experience.
It taught me that participation is more powerful than passive reach. The live chat, social comments, questions and jokes made viewers feel like they were inside the show.
It taught me that brands can receive more attention by giving creators room to create. Nissan did not get the Juke videos by controlling every frame. It got them by putting an unusual new car in our hands and letting us find the story.
It also taught me that the best marketing programs create receipts.
The YouTube channel still holds thousands of videos. The Flickr archive still contains the photos. The articles, campaign recaps and brand experiments still document what happened.
The shirts were temporary.
The internet kept the story.
From Wearing the Brand to Building Market Memory
Today, my work looks different.
I help companies build stories through public relations, podcasts, events, research, customer voices and creative campaigns. But the instinct behind the work has not changed very much.
Find the part of the company that people will actually care about.
Create something worth watching.
Bring the audience into it.
Document what happened.
Then turn that moment into a story that can keep traveling after the livestream ends, the event closes or the shirt goes into the laundry.
I Wear Your Shirt was influencer marketing before Instagram.
More importantly, it taught me that when a brand is brave enough to participate in culture instead of merely advertising beside it, the audience can become part of the story.
Explore more of my work or contact Evan White PR to create a campaign people will remember.