[W]hile these publicity stunts can sometimes leave us embarrassed, they’re always something we could look back at and laugh about.
Source/Credit: DocStoc
By By: Nicklas Prieto | March 31, 2014
As offices around the world prepare for some lighthearted fun, big brands are launching their most creative attempts to dupe their loyal followers. And while these publicity stunts can sometimes leave us embarrassed, they’re always something we could look back at and laugh about.
In the sprit of April Fools’ Day, let’s take a look at some of the best moments in one of business’ most amusing traditions.
9. 1940: Franklin Institute Announces the End of the World
April Fools’ Day in 1940 was no laughing matter for radio listeners in Philadelphia. On March 31, Philly radio station KYW broadcast a statement, “confirmed by astronomers of Franklin Institute,” that said the world would end at 3 p.m. the next day. The statement even declared, “This is no April Fool joke.”
Not surprisingly, panic ensued. Hundreds of citizens called into local news agencies, police stations and city offices. KYW apologized soon after, but they claimed they received the “news” from a trusted source, had genuinely believed it and reported it “in good faith.”
It turns out the hoax was perpetrated by a press agent from the Franklin Institute who wanted to promote a lecture titled “How Will the World End?” The agent, William Castellini, claimed he told “some people” at KYW that it was a hoax and assumed they knew it was a PR stunt; it was his homage to Orson Welles’ famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast a few years earlier. Franklin Institute was not amused, and Castellini was quickly dismissed from his position.
8. 2013: Twttr Is Launched
Whereas April Fools pranks were once dominated by media and news companies, the tech world has recently taken to the internet in an attempt to claim ownership of the day’s foolishness. One of the better tech hoaxes in recent memory has to be last year’s announcement by Twitter of their new offering, Twttr, a basic service that allows users to continue posting on Twitter for free with one caveat: no vowels. For only $5 a month, users could gain premium access to Twitter, which allowed the use of all letters.
Twttr would “encourage a more efficient and ‘dense’ form of communication,” claimed the social media giant in a corporate blog post. To show how much they cared for their customers, Y’s would be free to use, as would be vowels in URLs, and languages not based on Latin characters (i.e. Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc.) would not be effected. They also offered an extra character—bringing the maximum post length to 141—“for those moments when you need just one more character to finish your thought”; the price of the character would be based on a bidding system reflecting the popularity of the character you wanted to use. They encouraged the use of a “nvwls” hashtag to bring attention to the change, which led to comments like comedian Rob Delaney’s “Y R y00 d0yng thys?” tweet.
Grammarians the world over decried the official end of the English language, claiming Twttr was the “nail in the coffin.” It didn’t take too long for everyone to figure out the launch was a prank, but the thought alone is enough to make English teachers and copy editors cringe.
7. 1975: This Day Tonight Announces Conversion to ‘Metric Time’
In 1966, Australia had successfully switched from pounds, shilling and pence monetary units to dollars and cents, so when a current-affairs show announced the impending shift to “metric time” a few years later, it was hard for Australians to be skeptical.
The new system would feature 20-hour days, 100-minute hours and 100-second minutes. Hours changed to “decidays,” minutes to “centidays” and seconds to “millidays.” Australian Deputy Premier Des Corcoran, the second-most senior officer in the Australian government, was interviewed on the show and praised the new system. This Day Tonight even showed a picture of the Adelaide town hall with a new 10-hour clock face.
Aussies eventually got wise to the ruse, but not before the TV station received a number of calls, including one caller who was wondering how he could convert his new digital watch to metric time.
6. 1996: Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell
A couple decades ago, Taco Bell facetiously took it upon themselves to help assuage the national debt. In full-page ads across six of the U.S.’ largest newspapers, Taco Bell announced it had just purchased the Liberty Bell from the U.S. government. The bell was to be moved from Philadelphia to historic Irvine, Calif. However, Taco Bell assured us, the bell would still be available for public viewing.
As an aside, they announced, its name would be changed to “Taco Liberty Bell.”
Not surprisingly, many Americans were not amused with a national treasure being the butt of a corporate joke. Both Taco Bell headquarters and Philadelphia’s branch of the National Park Service were flooded with angry phone calls. Taco Bell issued a press release at noon on April Fools’ Day, claiming it was “The Best Joke of the Day,” but the damage had already been done. Journalists and patriots nationwide slammed the publicity stunt, but as Taco Bell was trying to put out those fires, they also enjoyed a nice boost in revenue. Their PR agency, Paine & Associates, later proudly claimed the stunt garnered press in more than 650 print outlets and 400 broadcast outlets, saying the free publicity was equivalent to $25 million in advertising.
5. 1985: Sports Illustrated Discovers Sidd Finch
Sports fans will remember this one.
In 1985, Sports Illustrated published a 14-page story titled “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.” It featured an unlikely baseball phenom who hurled fastballs at speeds higher than 160 miles per hour (to put this in perspective for non-baseball fans, a solid MLB pitcher might throw balls in the upper 90s). The story explained that he gained his rocket arm at a monastery in Tibet, and his quirk was wearing a single hiking boot on his right foot. It also revealed that he was about to reach a deal to play for the New York Mets. The piece was supplanted by pictures of the gangly prospect working out at the Mets’ spring training facility, including a shot of a catchers’ mitt with a hole burnt into it.
For Mets fans who had been privy to a number of less-than-stellar seasons, the prospect was a welcomed addition. But journalists, baseball execs and others were at an uproar. Long Island Newsdayreports a rival exec called a member of the Mets brass to complain that he had never heard of the kid, to which the Mets exec responded, “sometimes guys fall through the cracks.” A sports editor from a New York newspaper reportedly called the Mets VP of PR in a rage about them leaking the story to Sports Illustrated and not their paper, stating, “We cover you guys on a daily basis! It’s not fair! It’s not right!” Rumor also has it that a Senate staffer contacted a Mets exec to see if the story was true, as he was planning bets with his Senate colleagues.
Unfortunately for Mets fans, the story was revealed to be a joke, but the stunt is often referred to as the greatest hoax in sports history. And to this day, Joe Berton, a former middle school teacher who portrayed Sidd Finch in the feature piece, is a recognized baseball legend.
4. 1994: PC Computing Announces Ban on Drunk Internet Surfing
This is probably one hoax we wouldn’t mind to be actually true. Using the moniker “Information Highway” as justification, the magazine broke news about a bill going through Congress, dubbed “SB 040194,” which made it illegal to “drive” the internet while drunk.
The magazine assured its readers of the bills’ impending passage, writing “[What Congressman] wants to come out and support drunkenness?” and later adding, “Congress apparently thinks being drunk on a highway is bad no matter what kind of highway it is.”
Many readers overlooked the bills coded title (04/01/1994) and failed to notice that the name for the bill’s listed contact person, “Lirpa Sloof,” was “April Fools’” backwards. So many upset readers phoned Congress that Senator Edward Kennedy had to release an official denial of the rumored bill.
3. The Guardian
These next few brands have so many great hoaxes that it’s impossible to feature just one. The first of our most foolhardy brands is The Guardian, one of the U.K.’s most-read newspapers. Let’s take a quick look at our top two Guardian April Fools stunts.
1977’s San Serriffe: Does the name ring a bell? For those not familiar with typography lingo, serifs are short lines at the top and bottom of printed letters, but “San Serriffe” was a fictional string of semicolon-shaped islands in the Indian Ocean that The Guardian featured in a 1977 news piece. Its two primary islands were “Upper Caisse” and “Lower Caisse,” which featured a forested area known as “the Woj of Type” and was home to their national bird, “the Kwote.” Notice a pattern yet? Hundreds of letters and phone calls were sent to The Guardian in hopes of gaining tourist and investment opportunities on the island; they were undoubtedly disappointed to later learn the island was a hoax based on typography terminology.
2009’s Twitter Switch: If the launch of Twttr signified the death of the English language, The Guardian’s switch to Twitter signified the death of print. In an attempt at “consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media,” The Guardian announced it would become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively on Twitter, limiting its stories to merely 140 characters. The story, titled “Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink,” had a subheader that read, “Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters.” To prove it, the article said The Guardian was working on a “mammoth” project to rewrite the whole of the paper’s archive into tweets. Two such “stories” included the tweets “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more” and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?” Luckily for U.K. readers and other fans of journalism, The Guardian and other news sources won’t be exclusively a social media outlet any time soon (we hope).
2. Google
Google may have become the king of April Fools in recent memory, launching multiple pranks on the day ever since 2000’s “MentalPlex” hoax, which promised to project a mental image of what users wanted to find while staring at an animated gif. Listing all of Google’s hilarious pranks would be a bit too daunting, so here’s a couple that we feel stood out from the rest.
2011’s Autocompleter Job Opening: A couple years ago, Google Jobs joined the fun and created a video promoting an opening for a “Google autocompleter.” You know those suggested keywords that popup underneath the Google search bar? Your job, had you earned the position, was to guess what the user was thinking and type in the suggestions before he or she could finish. The video featured a veteran autocompleter who had gotten his start as a spell checker: He was supposedly the one who typed in the “Did you mean” suggestions when users misspelt keywords on Google searches. He offered prospective autocompleters a job description, concluding with the two qualities needed to be a successful autocompleter: typing really fast and being a psychic.
2013’s Google Nose Beta: Announcing “The new scentsation in search,” Google gifted its users the sense of smell on last years’ April Fools’ Day. The product’s landing page featured a shot of a woman indulging in a scent through her cellphone, and just below were search results for “Wet Dog,” complete with the description, “Aggressive and foxy with notes of musk, wet towel.” Below the results were suggested smells under a “People also sniffed” headline; these included lemon, horse manure, car exhaust, locker room and spring morning. Google also assured readers, “when you’re wary of your query,” that SafeSearch could be enabled. The video that introduced Google Nose Beta featured a man at his computer searching for the smell of “success,” then breathing in its aroma when Google completed his search.
1. BBC
As a wide-reaching and well-respected broadcaster, it’s easy to see why the British Broadcasting Company can easily dupe a number of its followers. Their position as a media giant gave them access to an April Fools audience that few could top before the internet took over. Let’s take a look at some of their best work.
2008’s Flying Penguins: A few years ago, the BBC released a trailer to a documentary that had a few of us believing that they’d found a flock of penguins that could fly. The documentary, titled “Miracles of Evolution,” told viewers the birds’ flight was an adaptation that arose from their need to escape the harsh winters in Antarctica. It shows the flock flying off an iceberg and filling the sky, then they’re seen soaring through green forests in South America. While the graphics may be a bit outdated today, the whimsy is still something we can all enjoy.
1957’s Spaghetti Harvest: This is the granddaddy of all April Fools’ Day pranks. Believed to be one of the first television hoaxes pulled on April Fools’ Day, BBC ran a quick mockumentary more than a half-century ago on its Panorama current-affairs show about a much-anticipated harvest in Switzerland. The video was narrated by well-respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby and featured a family from Ticino, Switzerland, working on their annual harvest. They were harvesting, of course, an “exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop.” The video told how a late frost can affect the pasta’s flavor, and while not as large as the “vast spaghetti plantations” of the Italian industry, the Swiss farmers enjoyed a nice crop thanks to the disappearance of the notorious “spaghetti weevil.” While many viewers complained about the spoof appearing on a factual program, countless others reportedly called in for more information on the spaghetti bushes, including a few asking about where they can buy one. And with a single three-minute video, BBC ushered in their reign as the king of April Fools.
Read original post here: The Biggest April Fools’ Day Pranks Pulled by Big Brands
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