How you’re marketing on April Fool’s Day
A few years back, on April 1st, I was catching a flight from Belfast to Edinburgh. Me and the rest of the passengers were surprised to hear the captain announce, “We will shortly be arriving in Amsterdam.”
It’s amusing what some people are coming up with for April Fool’s Day marketing campaigns.
Google launched their Gmail on April Fool’s Day 2004. This year they’re offering free wireless broadband through your toilet.
Virgin Atlantic previously made us aware of their genetic modification of butterflies so they could advertise on their wings.
How about when Virgin Cola released this one:
In 1996 Virgin Cola announced that in the interest of consumer safety it had integrated a new technology into its cans. When the cola passed its sell-by date, the liquid would react with the metal in the can, turning the can itself bright blue. Virgin warned that consumers should therefore avoid purchasing all blue cans. The joke was that Pepsi had recently unveiled its newly designed cans. They were bright blue. (via Museum of Hoaxes)
Even WordPress created an April Fool’s post.
Capitiol Blue Hill offer up 10 of the best April Fool’s Day pranks ever pulled off, including this one for the typographers amongst you:
In 1977, British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page supplement for the 10th anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semicolon-shaped islands. A series of articles described the geography and culture of the two main islands, named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse.
You can read more about how Taco Bell and Burger King market themselves on April Fool’s Day in a past post of mine – Top 5 successful marketing stunts.
Have you seen any cunning April Fool’s Day marketing? Perhaps you’ve pulled a prank yourself?
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[...] post by David Airey and plugin by Elliott [...]
Hehe.. I was about to blog about April 1st. Thanks for the link! Without it then coming back here might have taken more time ;)
Nice. I blogged about Google early this morning lol.
Good stuff.
Great links haha. I just got done reading some other April Fool’s blogs as well. Some of the pranks I read really fooled me too haha *looks at the date on the calendar.
[...] David, for the [...]
That Google thing was genius. Thanks for the laugh.
Good article. I think Techcrunch and Pud got the biggest rise for a hoax today. 240 comments and soooo many sucked in hook line and sinker.
The best one I heard of was a BBC documentary about spaghetti growing on trees. It was the leading serious journalist of the day, commenting on these Italians carefully removing strands of spaghetti from trees. It was in the days of black and white TV and before all that foreign food was readily available in every store. It suckered millions.
Did you noticed Matt Cutts (Google engineer) blog during the first days of April!? His blog looked as it was hacked…but then couple days later it came back up again and he said it was actually a April’s Fool joke.
I think the most important thing in Blogging and marketing is to have fun and some sense of humor while doing it. Great read!