Top 5 April Fool’s Stunts
By Alex Judd on Monday, April 1, 2013
April Fool’s is an absolute PR goldmine – but sometimes you can just blink and you miss it. So with that in mind – and in no particular order – here’s my top five pranks of the day.
First up is Virgin Atlantic (through agency Bray Leino) with their groundbreaking glass bottomed plane. Not for the faint hearted, this new design would mean everyone would have a view whilst travelling 40,000ft in the air – thus a reduction in window seat arguments and probably a rise in drink sales, as people seek to forget just far from the ground they really are.
Virgin Atlantic Glass Floor Plane
Next it’s hotels.com as they offered up bookings for the Belgian suite in Buckingham Palace – by Frank PR. Whilst not the most creative idea, it was certainly a quick and easy win – gaining a lot of coverage. Although if you want butler service, as Obama would have done in the very same european pharmacy online room, that’ll cost you extra and I do hope that’s not how we’re treating our visitors lately!
Hotels.com Buckingham Palace
Twitter continued its monetisation march and announced that it would charge users $5 to use vowels on the social network. This prompted the hashtag #nvwls and a few good tweets, most notably from Joan Rivers.
Google really went for it this year and uploaded long lost pirate treasure maps – as well as ‘revolutionising’ gmail by turning it blue. Although their nose project was the real spoof of note. If you went on to the search engine today, you would have seen an extra tab for this new feature where you could smell various things, such as a used napkin or wet dog, by getting right up close to your screen. Maybe it didn’t work for me because it was in BETA? But ten out of ten for effort Google.
Google Nose
Finally, the guardian introduced their own brand of glasses. A great bit of self deprecation by the left wing newspaper with the ability to review any product’s ethical standing right in front of your eyes. It also blanked out any views their readers wouldn’t agree with thanks to the built-in “anti-bigority” filter – making them a true liberal’s wet dream. Although a dream they remain.
Now I know there was a ton of activity that hasn’t been listed above, from YouTube shutting down to Sony’s pet electronics – but these were my subjective top five. Although please feel free to engage in the comment box and let me know your thoughts!
