At this point it isn’t even surprising to say that one longs for the days when April Fool’s was nowhere near the coordinated marketing effort that it is today. However, I can’t say that I dislike everything that they come up with .
Of course, one of my favorites in recent memory done by the biggest companies was Duolingo Push. Companies should be able to laugh at themselves, and with the enormous plush blankly staring at you, Duolingo’s marketing department made us believe it for a while.
Linus Media Group has done something similar this year. Making fun of the fact that everyone calls them blatant corporate shills (they aren’t, with 60 staff and most of their revenue coming from Merch, they are just corporate and nevermind the shill). It’s the evolution of years of April fool’s jokes that started as joke reviews of a case they had seen several times in the past, to fake server room fires (precluding actual server room fires) to a springtime-for-hitler OnlyFans.
Corsair joined the party with a 1-key keyboard (or as we know it, a doorbell). And Razer decided that it was time for humanity to move into its next, TRON-inspired phase with the metaverse Hypersense Suit. Naturally, it comes with RGB that nobody in the metaverse will see.
For the older tech enthusiasts, the Synology Floppystation will bring back fond memories of those final moments where floppy drives very quickly were becoming too small for anything but the most basic documents, immediately removing the sheen of a technology that had just finished making the 5.25”, actually floppy disk drive look positively last-decade. We would also have a chuckle at the HyperX touch grass keyboard. At least, until we discover just exactly what will happen to the grass during shipping.
All of this is fine, but I can’t help but notice that it’s just another element in an ever changing landscape. Much in the way superbowl ads started as that and now became just one of the three things vying for eyes on that particular Sunday (five, as we have to both count the puppy and kitten bowls). And ordinarily I would be annoyed. However, the simple fact of the matter is that these are those kinds of marketing projects that require a surprising effort for very little effort apart from an increased social media buzz (and maybe one or two conversions) for the first four days of April and the small, faraway possibility of being known in future years as “That company that makes really good April Fool’s jokes”, for whatever that may actually be worth in the way of potential consumers. Which means, for all of the people complaining about it now being annoying and a transparent marketing exercise, at the very least we know it will be a money loser at best, and a problem for a company’s corporate image at worst.
Let’s not forget, last year, Volkswagen had to convince us that no, they weren’t serious at all about Voltswagen.
