Green Day Is Buying Ad Space On Japanese Girls' Tattooed Thighs

Green Day is trying to regain a stronghold in cultural relevance with an ... unconventional ... marketing campaign: tattooing its new album cover on a Japanese fangirls' thighs. Don't worry, they're temporary.

The band paired up with Japanese PR company Absolute Territory to promote the Japanese release of its new CD “!Uno!” The promotion process is simple, the firm has girls above 18 years of age temporarily tattoo certain brand messages on the "absolute territory" between their high knee socks and the hem of their mini skirts. Because what else would they be wearing?

As long as the women wear the tattoos for at least eight hours a day and post pictures to their Facebook pages — they must have at least 20 friends on their social media accounts — they'll get paid. According to Oddity Central, more than 1,300 applied to work with the agency in November, and the number's growing.

Bizarre as this sounds, this marketing tactic actually makes some sense. Green Day is trying to recreate its 1990s and early 2000s hey dey, so it embraced another trend of the early-millennium: human billboards.

During the dot com boom,

people sold "ad space" on their bodies to URLs that were willing to pay up. A satisfactory fee would result in a permanent tattoo. Although most of the websites are now defunct, the skinvertising lives on.

Temporary tattoos were also huge among the boxing world a decade ago. Bernard Hopkins made $100,000 for wearing a temporary tattoo for casino Golden Palace in a big fight. The Nevada State Athletic Commission stopped the practice since it wasn't getting a cut and the tattooed ads had the potential to conflict with pre-existing sponsorships.

But it looks like both permanent and temporary tattoo ads are making a comeback.

Times Square celebrity the Naked Cowboy agreed to become Wow Body Ads' first human billboard by temporarily tattooing the company's logo onto his chest and back in December. This will subsidize his current income of marrying couples off in his underwear for $499 a pop.

Billy "the human billboard" Gibbon currently has 39 brand-related tattoos, and he's still selling off more space on his website. A 6" by 1" tattoo ad on his forehead costs $20,000.

Granted, some people don't need a company to pay them to get a tattoo of its logo. Sean "Diddy" Combs got a tattoo of New York magazine's logo on his own, and there's a slew of techies who love tech brands so much, they got tattoos of them.