Foolish Marketing

Every year, brands and agencies rack their brains to come up with the killer April Fool’s Day marketing stunt. And, every year, some win and some lose. We have two real winners this year, each from very different genres.

First up: Pornhub. Famously innovative and funny when it comes to marketing stunts, the controversial brand have done it again. This time, a simple end-screen that appeared each time a user finished watching a video on the site. It stated: “Thank you for sharing. Pornhub now has automatic video sharing to your social media accounts”. This subsequently caused thousands of video-watchers’ hearts to metaphorically and probably literally drop to the floor as they tried to comprehend the diabolical consequences this could have on their social life. Luckily, it was just a hoax, and, of course, Pornhub had no access to social media accounts around the world. However, the number of people who must have panicked and considered jumping out of a window must be astronomical. Genius and hilarious.

Second up: BBC Three. Using national icon David Attenborough in an April Fool was always going to be like treading on eggshells, but BBC Three nailed it. Promoting a new documentary entitled David Attenborough: Life of Grime on their Twitter account, the major appealing factor of this April Fool’s iteration was the personality it duped, hook, line and sinker. The BBC Three Twitter account was overwhelmed with DMs from Stormzy, complaining about the documentary and, in typical Stormzy fashion, telling them exactly what he thought of them. He then realised his error and sportingly tweeted with his tail between his legs: “Fam I’m coming off the Internet”. Scintillating success for BBC Three.

Of course, there were a plethora of different activations and stunts around the world, some of which were utterly brilliant, but these were the two that caught our eye. Check out the two foolish materials below.