NOT sure if a faceless corporation is pulling your leg? Check to see if it’s one of these exhaustingly tedious jokes that brands wheel out every April Fools’ Day.
Launching a stupid product
Before rushing to share a dubious article about a clearly bullshit product on social media, ask yourself: ‘Has Amazon really launched drones that can fly food straight into your mouth and wipe your arse or have I once again been hoodwinked because I’m a moron?’ As always, it’s the latter.
A silly name change
An absolutely barrel-scraping level of humour reserved for the most joyless of brands. Here the nuanced wit boils down to ‘We’ve told you something but it isn’t true’, which companies desperately hope will get them some attention. Although if BMW rebranded itself as The Rich Knobhead’s Car Company you’d have to at least respect their self-awareness.
Weird collaborations
Pairing a product with an unlikely celebrity is the highest form of wit for advertisers, but it usually just leaves the rest of us desperately reaching for the remote. We can only assume that’s how those Just Eat adverts with Snoop Dogg came about, only now they’ve got out of control and nobody knows how to stop them.
Too good to be true inventions
As much as you want the hoverboard from Back To The Future Part II to become a reality, it’s very unlikely that Tesla has discovered the secret of anti-gravity and rushed it to market without anybody noticing. You’re just going to have to make do with those self-balancing scooters that explode at random and make you look like a dickhead.
A prank that will backfire
Ironically, watching a company’s PR department furiously back-pedal on a misguided joke that’s been ripped apart by social media is the only way a brand can hope to be funny on April Fool’s Day. Although they probably want us to laugh with them, not at them. The sooner the clock hits midday and this shit’s over for another year, the better.
