Welcome to the latest edition of my new weekly blog series, Steal This. Each week I’ll highlight a marketing activity that a company is using and suggest ways that you can model it and make it work for you. Last week’s topic was – Movie Trailers.

Today’s topic is: Outside the Box Thinking

An interesting story surfaced last week about a Japanese advertising agency that found a new place to sell ads: women’s thighs.

The agency will pay women to wear an ad on their thigh, provided they are over 18, they meet the minimum number of friends on social media sites, they wear skirts and high socks, and they take a photo of the ad and post it online from two different geographical locations.

Regardless of what you think about this idea, you have to see the innovative thinking behind it.

So how can you steal it?

Granted, this one is a bit more vague than earlier posts in this series, but the point is that you need to find things that no one else is doing. Where can you advertise that no one else is advertising? How can you find people that no one else is finding? What can you offer that no one else is offering?

This may sound stupid, but it’s this type of innovative thinking that has created every new industry in our history. What seems crazy today might be main stream in a matter of years. So how can you beat your competitors to it?

As always, tell me what you think of this week’s idea and suggest other marketing programs to “Steal” in the comments below.