Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite this blatant. But it’s most impressive – the retailer is buying my permission (but only if I purchase.) Very clever indeed. Should this be best practice from now on?

What the cynical marketing hack in me likes best of all though is the voucher you receive on the click-through page:

So — you see — I receive that £150 discount anyway. I can only claim one discount (had I already signed up to the newsletter this voucher would be worthless.)

Here are the searches that led traffic to my site between midnight and 5am

This does not make me more likely to go back to sleep.

Given my sudden realization that I am now “middle aged” (although, in terms of lifestage, I’m really still a young adult) I was mildly stunned to see this in today’s analytics results.

This is how people found my blog.

Older single men wanted.

Hmph.

Today, at least, I’m the seventh Google result for that particular search. As it happens, no-one really seems to be doing natural SEO for that particular search. Perhaps there’s a limited market for older single men.

According to NicheBot Classic there are only around 4 searches every day for “single old men” on Google. Google’s own keyword tool suggests that – while there are 74,000 searches for “single men” every month “single older men wanted” isn’t the big keyword. Ah well.

Well – screen resolutions were lower back then.

From a comment stream on the FT

Tags: spam

I received this today. Anyone interested? I shan’t be going

Dear all,

The Gillette team needs your help. We are looking to recruit 20 men that meet the following criteria:

• single
• 25-45 years old
• takes an active interest in his appearance

Each man, in return for £50 and a Gillette goody bag, would need to come to the London office straight after work on Friday 25th July to take part in an experiment for the evening. In advance of arriving at the office each man will have been using a deodorant sample for a few days (we will confirm nearer the time).

At our office, they will be introduced to psychologist David Moxon and be fitted with heart rate monitors. The first experiment will involve each man presenting for 2 mins on a randomly selected topic.

The men will then travel by underground to a speed dating event (hence they need to be single, and heterosexual I’m afraid).

After the speed dating they are free to go.

The results of this experiment will be used as part of the PR campaign to support the launch of Gillette’s new deodorants in 2009. We will therefore need to ask the men to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Please could you send me the contact details of men you think would be interested in doing this, or give them my contact details to get in touch.

Many thanks

Susie

So much of my media consumption these days is made up of podcasts that I’ve decided to keep a kind of a scrapbook here on Mediaczar. Obviously the problem is that you can’t deeplink into a video or a audio file, so I’m crudely chopping the bits out that I like, and using the Anarchy Media Player plugin to host them here.

This is probably contravening all sorts of copyright laws. Fingers crossed, eh? I’m hoping it counts as fair use.

Here’s a short extract from TWiT (The Week in Tech, a popular podcast that I follow) where Leo Laporte (TWiT), Jason Calacanis (Mahalo), Tom Merritt (C|Net), and Dwight Silverman (Houston Chronicle) discuss briefly how it feels to be chased by PRs.

Listen here

OK – I’m not sure about the “thousands”, but Marshall Kirkpatrick’s article shows how you can use a combination of tools and tricks to get the most out of your RSS feeds – without getting swamped. Useful stuff!

read more | digg story

This is very clever. EA has released the Spore Creature Creator ahead of the launch of the game (due in September, I think). In the meantime, the Creator has tools for exporting animated gifs to your machine, and screencaptures straight to YouTube — which means that there’ll be plenty of buzz-worthy blog fodder out there…

Like this; the mediaczauros.

(Thanks to Kerry for the link…)