I walked past this scene outside the Barclays Bank on Dean Street in Soho this afternoon - what on earth is this all about?  Have they spent their massive profits building a new private army?

That's the headline of a story in the Times this morning - which, as my colleague William has pointed out, is one of the all-time great headlines.

Yesterday I was talking at the IDM about email creative and as normal a question came up along the lines of "can I use FREE in an email subject line".

The answer is probably yes.  If you run FREE through SpamAssassin it does give you a negative score of 1.0, but that generally won't be enough to prevent your email from getting delivered - particularly if you have a generally good reputation score. 

Generally speaking we could be much much braver with headlines.  And to prove the point, I did a quick check on The Times' headline - and it too would have got through SpamAssassin pretty much unscathed.  Of course, had the journalist been more precise, using brand names of drugs and perhaps quoting prices, then we might have more of a mountain to climb.

Voting is in full swing for the panels at next year's SXSW in Austin Texas.  Earlier this year I was lucky enough to do a panel on doing business in Europe - next year I'd love to go back.

I have two sessions you can vote for.

1) Is too much math killing marketing

Breakthrough marketing used to come from creative genius, from big ideas, from empathy with customers. But now all the attention goes to rigorous testing and algorithmic approaches to customer insight. So is the science driving out creativity - or are we focused on the wrong kind of maths?

To vote for this one, go here.

2) How Social Media CRM Will Transform Marketing Communications

If email is dying, what does this mean for eCRM? Can Twitter, Facebook Messaging and Google Wave do the same heavy lifting as a good old-fashioned email newsletter? The new social media tools may be free - but are they as useful for businesses as the ones they replace?

To vote for this one, go here.

You don't have too long to vote - actually voting closes at midnight on Friday the 4th September.

If you're interested in the second topic, I'm doing a cut-down version of this at the IDM Academy at Ad:Tech in London.  And no doubt I can find some way to get the first topic out into the fresh air.

So thank you, thank you, thank you!!

One definition of the shallowness of the modern world is that the focus at this week’s Nokia World conference will no doubt be on which handsets Nokia releases and whether or not they have an iphone beater tucked up their Nordic sleeves.

But more interesting than all this hardware is the pre-announcement last week of Nokia Money.  To quote from the press release, Nokia Money:

“…will enable consumers to send money to another person just by using the person's mobile phone number, as well as to pay merchants for goods and services, pay their utility bills, or recharge their prepaid SIM cards.”

This promises to bring simple 24-hour banking services to a huge number of people, particularly in the developing world.  Globally there are about 4 billion mobile phones, but only 1.6 billion bank accounts.

If Nokia can pull this off, then I think this would be a Very Good Thing. Of course, not as interesting as whether the Spotify app is approved for the iPhone </irony>, but decently cool all the same.

Nice little stunt in the street outside Sony HQ in Great Marlborough Street - Watchdog has a van parked up full of engineers who are repairing PlayStations for free to bring attention to Sony's charging policy.

This kind of consumer direct action reminds me of a Milton Jones' joke - available I believe on a nice shiny DVD just in time for Christmas. 

"I went to our local train station and they told me 'There's a bus replacement service running today.'  So I gave them a tin of pineapple rings.  'What's this?'  'It's my money replacement service.'

I’ve recently been playing with Wolfram Alpha, which pulls in some great statistical information when you search on a first name, including the age distribution of the name and the average age of people with a particular name.

All this makes me think that you could make some pretty reasonable assumptions based purely on a first name.

Take ‘Gordon’ for instance.  Most famous Gordon is probably our current prime minister.  Wolfram Alpha’s search on Gordon shows the birth dates of Gordon over time (US only data, unfortunately):

And from that data, you can generate another graph showing the age distribution of people called Gordon:

So the average age of an American called Gordon is 58 – which co-incidentally is the age of Gordon Brown.

Turning to David Cameron, David is a much more common name – but even so the average age of all Davids is 50.  Not a million miles away from David Cameron’s real age of 43.

So OK, if I could get hold of UK data this would be more interesting.  But my basic thought is that if your email address contains your first name, marketers could probably make a pretty good stab at guessing your age.

A month since my last look at the murky world of celebrities on Twitter – so what’s new? 

Well as usual I have noticed someone I’ve miss someone completely off the list – in this case Jamie Oliver, who has swept up an impressive 150,000 followers.

Elsewhere, Lily Allen is now very close to the magic one million followers – I guess she’ll probably make it in a week or so.

And those who were shocked at Coldplay overtaking Stephen Fry will not be cheered by the fact that Richard Bacon now has more followers than the erudite Mr Fry.

Celeb	Followers
Coldplay	1,384,168
Lily Allen	956,466
Neil Gaiman	777,202
Imogen Heap	709,445
Richard Bacon	672,436
Stephen Fry	659,472
Eddie Izzard	654,437
Russell Brand	457,507
Jonathan Ross	363,176
Alan Carr	263,683
Chris Moyles	230,204
John Cleese	214,625
Phillip Schofield	213,956
Fearne Cotton	180,720
Jimmy Carr	174,450
Jamie Oliver	150,083
Richard Branson	143,449
Holly Willoughby	109,828
Alan Davies	81,761
David Mitchell	80,863

Speaking as someone whose last meal was the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Hut in Victoria, Diana Janicki's blog Growling Belly is a glimpse into a magical fairytale land where food is lovingly prepared and eaten with proper relish (and where relish does not equal bacon bits).

As I salivated over the "foolproof" recipe for pavlova with fresh summer berries I did worry that even my pizza-enhanced frame might struggle with the combined calorie load of meringue, whipping cream and sugar.

And astonishingly Google's content matching algorithm agrees with me - dropping in a banner for a weight-loss product into the recipe.

Hmmm.  Good thinking Google!

Of course if you really did want to lose weight, in the words of the old Irish joke, you wouldn't want to be starting from here!

Maybe more creative like this will sort out the UK’s woefully low average CTRs!