April Fool’s: The Day Your Marketing Prank Can Work… Or Backfire

It doesn't matter how early you wake up today. Someone is going to get you with an April Fools' gag. It could be in your office, it could be in your own home. But most likely someone in the marketing community is going to have a little fun at your expense.

Some work, some don't. But what works and why on April Fools' Day? Pretty much, light-hearted satire will help etch your brand into a consumer's memory in a positive way. But if you show bad taste, malice or toy with a consumer's intelligence and emotions, your prank is going to crash and burn.

Notice I'm not following that up by announcing a $4.99 per article charge to read content on the always-free ChiefMarketer.com Web site. That would be a prime crash and burn example.

So as brands today hit the world with their April Fools' hoaxes, here's a brief history of winners and losers to compare them with.

Google's TiSP
Google brought free wireless internet to people's homes last April 1… by way of the bathroom. Google issued this press release to announce Google TiSP (BETA), a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems.

Not only did Google call the project a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system, it came out with this installation guide that showed the inner-workings of its new "product."

It's rare when Google lets an April Fools' stinker rip. But another hoax it announced it announced in 2007, Gmail Paper, could have ruffled some unsuspecting feathers. That new product poked fun of data breaches and wasteful consumption with the printing and delivery of every e-mail you received at your Gmail account, with the delivery cost offset by on-paper advertisements.

And I'm sure even animal right's activists had a chuckle at Google's 2002 April Fools' hoax, PigeonRank, which made fun of marketers' inability to figure out how its search rankings worked.

Baba Booeyed by Howard Stern
The morning of April 1, 2004, K-Rock general manager Tom Chiusano announced that "The Howard Stern Show" had been cancelled, and pop music played on 92.3 FM in New York, as well as all the syndicates that carried the morning drive show.

While it was a good, fun gag, it really didn't leave a lot of Clear Channel's management laughing. About six weeks earlier, Clear Channel had indefinitely suspended Stern in six markets. And a week later, Stern and his wack pack were "permanently terminated" after a half a million in unrelated FCC fines were handed down.

Stern's contract with Infinity Broadcasting ended in 2005, and he moved to satellite radio with a megamillion dollar deal with Sirius. His show, and Sirius channels, are now heard by a smaller, targeted audience of Sirius subscribers, which has to have made his sponsors laugh with glee.

But radio hoaxes can backfire. Opie & Anthony didn't get the last laugh when they announced to WAAF listeners than Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had been killed in a car accident.

Sidd Finch and Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated will never be able to cook up a hoax like the April 1, 1985 Sidd Finch feature again. If George Plimpton being the author wasn't a dead giveaway, then the first paragraph should have been. The first letters in a string of words within the subhead about the obscure phenom pitching find by the New York Mets read "Happy April Fools' Day."

This was in the days before the Internet, so it was easy for the late Plimpton, who turned the character into a book, to get the New York Mets and Major League Baseball to play along.

And players, coaches, and scouts raved about Finch, who learned to pitch in a Buddhist monastery, could throw a 168 MPH fastball, and wore a heavy work boot on his anchor foot (and that was the only shoe he wore). And Finch's biggest professional decision in life was between a sport he'd never played, and the French horn.

As absurd of a story as Plimpton and Sports Illustrated's was, it created a media firestorm and a lot of curiosity. Sports Illustrated announced in the following issue, in a short piece, that Finch had retired. And on April 15, is admitted to the hoax.

Naming rights deals
The Website Museum of Hoaxes has documented some other good and bad April Fools marketing pranks that include some rather odd naming rights deals.

Taco Bell "paid" $300,000 for naming rights to The Liberty Bell (really, that was the cost of the April Fools' campaign) in 1996, and revealed its hoax after a ton of protests rolled in. But it resulted in an estimated $25 million in media exposure, and sales exceeding $1 million nationwide on April 1 and 2.

Just two years later, the media fell for another naming rights deal. Guinness issued a press release saying it had reached an agreement with the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, resulting in Greenwich Mean Time being renamed Guinness Mean Time through 1999. Now the media should have caught on when the release said it renamed "pips," or seconds, "pint drips."

That same day, Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced on its home page that it had been sold to Walt Disney Co. for $6.9 billion. The prestigious Cambridge school, according to this press release, was to be moved brick by brick to Orlando, and the Sloan School will be renamed the Scrooge McDuck School of Management. By the way, in case anyone still believes it, the move won't be complete for another two years.

And in 2000, Miller Light became the "exclusive sponsor" of the Marfa Mystery Lights, a lighting phenomenon in the little town of Marfa, TX. So the mysterious lights that seem to bounce around the sky each evening were renamed the "Miller Lites."

So prepare for today, and remember that you're going to be had by someone. So if you are in New York, maybe you should just play it safe and go to a parade instead.