April 1 jokes

It’s April 1 and time to pull jokes. But there’s an interesting move in using the jokes to get more publicity for a company, as Valleywag points out. Now, given the blog and the day, there’s a chance that this is not correct, but it feels like something that companies would do – pull an April fool but try and drum up as much publicity as possible through announcing it and trying to get people to write about it. It’s not necessarily the most effective way of getting PR – the best ones, the ones that tend to get attention, are from established players who you have to think twice about – although this one from Guinness you don’t have to think about much but isn’t it fun!. So all the usual suspects are playing around today, with Wikipedia having the usual great list. In fact, even Wikipedia is getting on the game, with their front page lists:

Screen shot from Wikipedia

But this is my favourite, from the BBC. I got fooled at first, given I was half listening to the morning TV and there was David Attenborough talking about flying penguins. It’s on the BBC front page and on the iplayer (that link likely to go very quickly) and just looks gorgeous. It’s also being used between programmes to advertise the iplayer all day by the look of it, so it’ll probably be one of the biggest viewed hoaxes – and one that totally makes sense as it fully advertises the service ;)

And that moment of take off:

Screen shot from BBC Iplayer