Use Your Head, Not Your Forehead

If you run a business or work in marketing, you know that reaching your intended audiences can be tricky. Word of mouth can only get you so far — ultimately, you’ll likely need to advertise. You can place ads on TV, radio, blogs, email newsletters, and billboards, for example. And if that latter one piques your interest, here’s a helpful hit: billboards may typically appear on the side of the road, but really, anything can be a billboard if the owner is willing.

Or particularly gullible.

This is one of those stories where a picture really does tell 1,000 words, so let’s start there.

The man above is named David Jonathan Winkelman, and as you can see, he has a tattoo on his forehead. It reads “93 Rock, the Quad City Rocker.” It’s a reference to a former radio station KORB 93.5 FM in Bettendorf, Iowa, one of the five (yes, five) cities in the Quad Cities region of Iowa and Illinois. In 2000, KORB — as the “93 Rock” moniker suggested — played mostly hard rock and classic rock songs, typically hosted by DJs who ran all sorts of promotions to keep listeners tuned in. Those DJs likely ran call-in giveaways for concert tickets or even cash — it’s a standard promotion run by many such radio stations. But that year, the DJs at KORB decided to get creative. They — jokingly, to be clear — offered a six-figure payout to anyone who would get the station’s name and tagline tattooed to their forehead.

Winkelman and a relative of his, Richard Goddard, Jr., apparently didn’t get that this was a joke, because they took them up on the offer. And when they went to claim their prize, the station managers let them know the bad news — there was no money to be had.

Winkelman and Goddard sued, arguing, per ABC 7 News, “claiming the station was trying to permanently mark listeners so that they could ‘be publicly scorned and ridiculed for their greed and lack of common good sense.’” For reasons unclear, Winkelman dismissed the lawsuit on his own, and Goddard failed to show up in court, and lost his case as well.

A decade later, Winkelman hadn’t taken any measures to remove the tattoo — but he had made another bad choice. As The Smoking Gun reports, he was arrested in Davenport, Iowa — another of the Quad Cities — on “a misdemeanor charge of operating a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent,” yielding the mug shot pictured above. And as you can see, the tattoo was still there. The same, however, cannot be said for KORB 93 Rock, the Quad City Rocker. In 2004, its corporate parent merged it with another nearby rock station and transitioned 93.5 FM to easy listening.

The good news for Winkelman, if any: the station has since flipped back to a rock format. Today, 93.5 FM in the Quad City area is I-Rock 93.5, under the call sign KJOC. So if he wants, he can update his forehead to promote them pretty easily.

Bonus fact: Winkelman’s forehead tattoo may be the first such advertisement of its kind, but it’s somehow not the last. In 2005, a Utah woman named Kari Smith put her forehead space on eBay, offering to place a permanent tattoo on it for the winning bidder. Online casino Golden Palace won the auction with a $10,000 bid and, as seen on Deseret News, Smith went through with the deal, adding the casinos URL to her head in bold, black lettering. Two years later, The casino sent her some more cash — to pay for the tattoo removal.

From the Archives: Ice Scream: If you eat ice cream too quickly, your forehead may hurt. Here’s the science behind ice cream headaches.