Couple Sells Ads to Pay for Wedding

Talk about a marriage of love and money. Tom Anderson and his bride Sabrina Root paid for their $34,000 wedding this weekend by selling advertising space at the ceremony and reception.

Everything from the wedding rings to a week at a penthouse in Cancun, Mexico, were donated after Anderson got 24 companies to sponsor the nuptials in exchange for having their names appear six times from the invitations to the thank-you cards.

Anderson, 24, a bartender, did cough up his own money for his wife's $1,400 engagement ring, while Root, 33, a hair stylist, paid $1,600 for her dress.

The groom got the idea of corporate sponsorships while working in a small struggling animation studio that often had to barter for services.

"So I was in a sales mode, and I got to thinking," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, which ran a photo of the couple sitting among their corporate-sponsored wedding "gifts" in its Sunday editions.

The bride drew the line at having advertising banners draped across the aisle. But her perfume came from a local distributor, and coffee was provided gratis from a neighborhood supplier.

Advertisers had their names appear on the invitations and thank-you cards, on cards at the buffet, on scrolls at the dinner table, in an ad placed in a local independent newspaper and in a verbal "thank you" that followed the first toast.

The Inquirer said the groom had bought two addresses on the Internet's World Wide Web, namely: sponsoredwedding.com and weddingsponsors.com.

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