I’ve decided to quit my current job and become a marketing genius who comes up with a really brilliant idea and retires early. The good news is, I’m already well on my way to my brilliant idea. I know that it doesn’t have to be a catchy phrase that everyone will be repeating for years and that will appear on the decade’s version of Trivial Pursuit (“Where’s the Beef?”). It also doesn’t have to be a mascot that everybody loves and recognizes for generations (Aflac duck, anyone?). No, marketing ideas like those are hard to come by, and their popular success is frighteningly fickle.

I’m going into a different -- but just as potentially lucrative -- niche of the marketing field: identifying and selling advertising space. Think about it: this must be the greatest job in the world! You just look around and recognize advertising potential. Let someone else come up with the “what” to actually put there. All you have to do is notice where everyone is already looking anyway, and make money off of that.

For example: the person who recognized that there was awesome potential value in the stupid little space on the top of the basketball hoop. Brilliant! No one at the game actually sees that little spot, of course, but EVERYONE who is watching the jump shots at home is blitzed with that camera angle a zillion times a game!

Or how about the space behind the pitcher at a baseball game? Again, folks watching from the bleachers won’t be much impressed by your ad sitting right there, because only about three of them will be able to see it. But guess what, EVERY camera pointed on the pitcher is going to catch it, and broadcast it to all of those viewers at home. Cha-ching.

Finding great marketing space doesn’t require a unique camera angle, though. Consider the guy who was staring blankly during a dull period in a hockey game, maybe cursing that his team was losing because the ref was an idiot, when all of a sudden he thought, “Hey, I wonder what it would take to put an ad right there under the ice?” The rest is advertising history (and laughter all the way to the bank).

The person who thought up using the athletes themselves as walking billboards is certainly dead by now, it has been going on for so long. But that doesn’t decrease the power of this great idea. I mean, once you got started with a simple logo on the sleeve of a jersey, there was no turning back: golfers’ hats, runners’ shoes, cyclists’ butts – nothing was sacred. (Basketball players’ hair was experimented with briefly, but was eventually abandoned after Dennis Rodman, with his usual flair, gave it a bad name. However, I think that poker players’ knuckles still have potential.)

So, my friends, I am going to become a space broker. All these folks do is realize that they keep staring at the same place, and then they stick something on it. (Kind of like a three-year-old male -- only with fewer toy trucks – probably – and lots more money.) The only problem is, I’m not sure who I’d talk to to get the rights to the space in the first place. In most cases I suppose it would be the guy who owns the stadium, but see, if he realizes he’s sitting on a potential cash cow, why would he sell it to me? Obviously it’ll take a little finessing, or what we liked to call in the theater the “charming and vague” approach, something along the lines of this:

“Wow, is this your hockey arena? Nice place.”

“Yep. We’re pretty proud of it. Seats 20,000 on game day. The rest of the week we rent it out to the local amateur figure skaters club, the Kerrigan Kuties.”

“They sound like a rough bunch.”

“It’s mostly the hockey players’ wives.”

“Uh huh. So you rent it out, huh? The whole place?”

“Yep. $500 an hour.”

“That’s a lot. So, what would you charge for renting out just the ice?”

“Just the ice?”

“Yea, I don’t need the entire building, the stands, the lights, and all that stuff. I’m just interested in the ice. Really, just a couple of inches of space – not nearly what the Kuties take up.”

“And what are you going to do with a couple of square feet of ice on the floor of a hockey rink?”

“Oh, I don’t know – I’ve just always had this childhood dream of owning a hockey rink, you know, like some people dream about living in a mansion someday. But I don’t have the resources to own an entire rink just yet, so I thought hey, if I bought some ice, it’d be kind of like a starter-mansion…”

“A starter ice mansion?”

“Yea, you get it! What do you say?”

Maybe, maybe not. It’ll take a little work to iron the kinks out, but I think you can see the potential of this idea. In the meantime, I think I’d better go sit on the couch and stare at the TV, in the interests of market research. No telling how many empty spaces I stare at are potentially marketable.

I tell you, the perks of this job just never end.