Thursday, December 02, 2010

Email Of The Day

Picture (unrelated to email below) via Gizmodo

OK, so I think I've used up my quota of righteous indignation for, like, the next five years (I could never write for Pam's House Blend), so let's turn to something lighter, shall we? I got this email today:

Hi Peteykins,

I work for the website team of [redacted sex toy company] and have a kind favor to ask of you. We are looking for bloggers like yourself to review a product of ours on your blog. We would send the product to you free of charge; all that we would ask for in return are a few links back to our site (redacted) with the anchor text reading “Sex Toys”. Please let me know what you think, I look forward to hearing back from you!

Best,

[redacted]

So... uhhh... how does one review a sex toy? I suppose I would have to give it a whirl, so to speak, and then report on its effectiveness. My coworkers read this blog! My family reads this blog! And what do they mean by bloggers like myself? Have they read this site? I can see if a shoe company or a purveyor of, say, sequined miniature cowboy hats made this offer, but sex toys? As enticing as the offer is (not really), I'll have to pass, thanks.

I'm not totally against the idea in principle. If I got the same offer from Comme des Garçons, I'd happily oblige.

Um... please? Comme des Garçons? I'd happily oblige.

2 comments:

samael7 said...

Hee hee! The Bloggess gets these quite often and will share them sometimes with her readers. The particularly egregious ones that are of the transparently "Love your site! Will you give me free press?" type, she responds back to the sender with something crazy.

I think one such letter wanted her to review a technique for sign language for toddlers. She "thanked" the sender but demurred, explaining that her child was born without hands, so could it be adapted to feet, and failing that, might it work with her cat?

She recently had to bury her family's dead dog that died unexpectedly, posted about it on her personal blog in an uncharacteristically somber post (she's usually hysterically insane), and got one of these letters saying how much they enjoyed her post about her burying her dead dog, and would she please check out their product and post a link to it. I don't think that ended well for the shill.

All that said, I think Comme des Garçons is being terribly shortsighted here, if they haven't pestered you yet. It's like they're trying to fail.

Anonymous said...

Obviously Comme des Garçons hasn't done the extensive research yet to understand the maturity, wealth, and stability of your loyal audience of hairdressers. The sex toy manufacturer's have.