Last year, I took over as editor/publisher of the leading online trade journal for veterinary nurses in the UK. It's been a real eye-opener being on the receiving end of press releases for a change.

One arrived a week ago from the Samaritans, with the results of a survey the charity had conducted into levels of stress amongst Britons. A great piece of work it was too, containing all sorts of fascinating statistics.

Kind of interesting how people from different parts of the country react to stress. In Yorkshire, they kill themselves (or think about it, at least). In the South East, they become irritable and frigid. In the South West, they go for a brisk walk. In Wales, stress puts them off their food. And in Northern Ireland, they get drunk.

There's a lesson in this for anyone thinking about a career as a vet (a profession which already has a suicide rate 4 times higher than the national average): for God's sake don't go and practice in Yorkshire.

One criticism of this otherwise excellent PR campaign: the press release was sent a week in advance under an embargo. Why? I mean, it's fine if you're giving long lead time publications and forward planning desks a bit of advance warning (thereby putting them on a level playing field with the dailies). But sending it under an embargo to short lead time publications is just bloody annoying. Why not just send it when you want me (or journalists from rather more important publications than mine) to write about it?

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Alex Tew of milliondollarhomepage.com fame is at it again. This time, though, he's selling pixels on pixelotto.com for double the money, so that he can offer another million bucks as a prize for people who click on the ads.

Clever.

Should you buy his pixels? Hmmm. Depends. People who click on these ads are clicking because they might win a million, not because they're looking for your product. So even if you assume that everyone disables their pop-up blocker (as they will need to in order to see your website), you'd need a pretty compelling and probably low cost proposition to convert that disinterested visit into a sale.

For its success, pixelotto is entirely dependent on the media. I'm sure he'll get plenty more coverage for this latest venture. Maybe even enough to give lastminute.com the brand exposure it'll need to justify its $20,000 pixel investment.

But will he get as much media exposure as last time around? I doubt it. The story is essentially the same: some clever geezer flogging pixels. There are only so many ways the story can get reported before we all get bored (I'm bored already).

And that's why I disagree with Tew's comment on the BBC website: "This idea has longevity. I don't know anyone who doesn't want to win $1m dollars, so I can keep doing it again and again."

Without the media driving traffic, people are just not going to come and keep clicking for the one in a trazillion chance of winning a million bucks a year down the road. I'd rather buy a lottery ticket and find out this weekend.

Advertisers are excluded from the draw for a million. So the question is, click or advertise?

My view: save your money and click.

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The importance of good translation in marketing communications was highlighted recently in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, amongst others.

The Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation decided to rename it's latest aquisition, MG Rover, as 'Roewe'. That means 'honour and prestige' in Chinese. Very laudable. But in Britain, 'Roewe' is pronounced 'wrong way'.

It's rarely big companies that make this kind of mistake. Most, like that old chestnut about Ford supposedly launching a car in Brazil called a 'Pinto' (Brazilian slang for male genitals), and then hurriedly changing it to 'Corcel' (a horse) are urban myths.

No, it's usually small companies that make the best mistakes, my favourite being the restaurant in St Tropez which proudly announces that: 'our chef, Stephen, will amaze you with the brighlights of his papillas'.

Hopefully there won't be any errors in the translation of the copy we've just done for a friend on www.dutoit-protect.com. But if there are any French people (or in a few weeks, Spaniards, Germans or Italians) reading this post, and you spot any howlers on that link, do let me know.

Incidentally, a plug for the company that translated it: Applied Language Solutions. Very good.

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Delayed again, this one, but as you might have noticed if you've been here before, we've been busy repainting the walls, so as to speak.

Anyway, a great public relations initiative from Coutts who carried out a survey to find out how much money you need to be a millionaire these days. And no, the answer to that question isn't the obvious one.

To enjoy the lifestyle we've all come to associate with being a millionaire (a big house, 2 staff, 2 luxury cars, an apartment in the South of France, and a yacht), you need £2.6M. Or, as Coutts winningly put it, to be a 'thrillionaire'.

I suppose everyone has their own definition of what a millionaire lifestyle is. But I think Coutts may have rather underestimated. The house and holiday apartment are going to set you back a minimum of £1.6M. The yacht, at least another £600K. And you won't see much change from £100K for a couple of new Mercs. But then you'll probably want the children educated privately, which is another £200K down the tubes. And that's before you've earned enough to enjoy all these trappings and pay the staff, for which you're going to need at least another £6M at today's interest rates. A grand total of about £7.5M.

So my advice to the 65% of the population that would apparently give up the day job immediately if they won a million. Don't.

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I don't think Nottingham University student Alex Tew will have any difficulty getting a job when he graduates. There's always one here if he wants it.

Faced with the prospect of a student debt of £30,000, he came up with the idea of selling a million pixels on his home page, for a dollar each. Of course, a pixel isn't much use to anyone, so the minimum purchase is 100 pixels, which can be used to advertise your website.

As the BBC notes, if he sells all his pixels, he'll have a lot more than he needs to buy textbooks. And it'll more than cover a few pairs of the expensive socks he wants. So he says he'll give some to his parents and invest the rest in a couple of interesting business ideas he's got up his sleeve.

Call me a sucker, but I'm off to buy myself some pixels. I don't think it'll help with our search engine rankings (too many outbound links on the page, with no relevance). I'm not even convinced that the sort of people that will click on my pixels will be the target audience for our consultancy services. But damn I love a good idea, and I'm only too pleased to support that kind of initiative.

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A few weeks old, this story, but I've been tied up with other projects. Anyway, a belated congratulations to www.payfinder.com for its survey which found that women still earn less than men in the UK, and that the gap is getting bigger. OK, it's not perhaps the most mind-blowingly original idea for a survey, but it was very professionally executed, and earned the site blanket print and broadcast media coverage (including every PR consultant's wet dream of a plug in the offline edition of Daily Mail).

The Tesco Clubcard was surely one of the greatest marketing ideas of all time. Launched in 1996, the loyalty card now has some 10 million subscribers and spawned a multitude of copycats.

A clever PR stunt put the Clubcard back in the news yesterday. According to the Daily Mail, some more astute shoppers have noticed that the value of Clubcard points earned on a purchase is sometimes more than the cost of the purchase itself. As a result, one person went and bought himself 10,148 ready meals. They cost him £6,596, but earned him £20,296 worth of points. Even after paying for a van to take the meals to a homeless shelter, that's still a nice little earner.

Other people don't quite seem to have got the hang of it. Another shopper bought 924lbs of bananas (which I calculate is a staggering 2500 of them) in order to make a profit of, wait for it, £24.64.