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June 24, 2019

April Fool’s – Your Next Marketing Campaign Idea

Top branded April Fool’s jokes from around Asia Pacific

The first of April is the one day each year big businesses and individuals can get away with telling lies. From the creative and enlightening through to the outright bizarre, news stories have broken around the world about unbelievable press releases and inspired pranks.

Whether your company was directly involved in the festivities or simply enjoyed the fallout from the sidelines, your media monitoring tools may have gone wild on April 1. Here are just three of the best branded April Fool’s jokes from the Asia Pacific region in 2015:

Google’s Panda update – Japan

Google has never been one to shy away from the opportunity to pull an April Fool’s prank, and the company got in early this year by announcing the launch of a new voice-enabled search engine – Google Panda.

This soft, rounded and totally adorable release is “engineered with state of the art emotional and conversational intelligence,” explained Google Vice President of Engineering Chris Yerga.

“All you have to do is speak your mind.”

Focusing on the black and white colouring, the engaging button eyes and the “cute’ function, the product launch captured the hearts of thousands. Check out more about this adorable update in the official Google Japan video below:

Virgin Australia’s pooch pampering

Following on with the cute theme, Virgin Australia has released a video promoting their dedicated lounge for pets. The video, featured below, explains that as an extension of their pet frequent flyer program, the company is establishing a new service for your furry flying companions.

While the logistics of the actual lounge are less than believable, it’s easy to get caught up in the joy of the video – as puppies and cats frolic across the screen. Offering entertainment, quality cuisine and pampering, the lounge sounds like an ideal place for any disgruntled traveller, but is strictly pets only.

BMW’s unbelievable trade-in – New Zealand

On April 1 2015, BMW Newmarket in Auckland, New Zealand, took out a front page ad offering an unbelievable deal. The short blurb claimed that the first person who took their car and the front-page coupon into the dealership would drive away with a brand new BMW.

The great thing about this particular prank? BMW followed through with the deal. When a lucky punter turned up in their 15-year-old Nissan Avenir, the dealership happily handed over the keys to a new BMW 1 Series worth close to NZ$50,000.

Although…

This move has sparked a lot of positive interest on social media, making it a great marketing campaign for the company. However, you should be careful before taking on a prank like this in your own company – as such a high-cost giveaway can have a lot of risks.

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The fundamentals of stakeholder strategy

A practical guide to tailored stakeholder management, offering strategies and tools to identify, map, and nurture relationships.

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Across the communications landscape, teams are being asked to do more with less, while staying aligned, responsive and compliant in the face of complex and often shifting stakeholder demands. In that environment, how we track, report and manage our relationships really matters.

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Blog
SRM vs CRM: which is right for PR & Comms teams?

Across the communications landscape, teams are being asked to do more with less, while staying aligned, responsive and compliant in the face of complex and often shifting stakeholder demands. In that environment, how we track, report and manage our relationships really matters. In too many organisations, relationship management is still built around tools designed for […]

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