Hate the game, and the game is chasing earned media on April Fool’s Day

Welcome to a Friday edition of Unmade, the analytical email your boss might ask you about.

Today: Why do brands still persist with April Fool’s Day? And a modest rebound on The Unmade index.

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The empty ritual of branded April Fools jokes

All things being equal, this email would have been sent at around 8.30.

But we decided to wait until 9.01 AEDT to respect an embargo (the subject of brands sending out embargoed press releases without the journalist first agreeing the timing is a topic for a whole other day).

Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day – that traditional day to play a harmless prank on somebody, and wait until noon to tell them.

Or that’s how it used to be anyway. Now it’s another day on the social media content calendar. No actual trickery is involved.

It’s become an entirely empty process where PR teams devise a harmless, and often lame, idea that wouldn’t fool anybody, and just to make sure, send out a press release ahead of time anyway. The name of the game is to get the brand’s name into the news roundups about April Fool’s, not to fool anybody.

Take Virgin Australia. They send out their press release two days early, embargoed until this morning – a full day ahead of April Fool’s Day. In an email with the subject line “April Fool’s Day”, just to make sure they couldn’t be accused of pranking the journos.

In much the same way that brands release their Superbowl ads ahead of time, now they release their April Fools content beforehand.

It’s as professional a PR package as any, complete with images, high res video, and YouTube links.

There’s a slickly produced 30-second ad designed to garner free airplay. I doubt there’ll be any genuine ad spend behind it whatsoever. It’s all about the earned media.

The joke, such that it is, is that passengers can get their dry cleaning done during the flight.

It’s a case of hate the game, not the player. Virgin wouldn’t invest the time and energy into the process unless it was confident the press would pick it up. Despite the full knowledge that nobody will be fooled, radio TV bulletins and news sites will cheerfully put the Virgin stunt within the April Fool’s day wrap that some poor schmuck will be assigned to put together.

The journalists will know that nobody is being fooled, but it all makes for good content.

In my days at Mumbrella, I was as guilty as anyone, getting up early each year on April 1 to kick off the round up, which was extremely SEO-friendly.

Like I say, hate the game, not the player.

It’s the ultimate, victimless PR crime. The brand knows it isn’t fooling anyone. The news outlets report the story, knowing that nobody was fooled, and the audience reads, watches and listens, and is in on the joke too (I think?). It’s positively post-modern.

Hell, I feel like I’ve written this piece before.

Tomorrow is going to be a long day.

• What do you think? Is that too curmudgeonly a view? Tell us via the comments button

Domain pushes the index back up

It was a mixed day for stocks on the Unmade Index yesterday, although strong performances from Domain and parent company Nine helped drag the whole sector upwards.

Nine rose by 3.1%, while Domain was up 2.36%. Ooh Media was the only other stock to rise, going up by 0.32%.

Both audio stocks declined yesterday, with Southern Cross Austereo falling 1.69% and HT&E falling 0.91%. Agency group Enero dropped by 3.72%.

Time to leave you to your Friday. I’ll be back tomorrow with Best of the Week, squeezed around Practice Day for the Formula One grand prix in Melbourne.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts on April Fool’s Day.

Have a great day.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher – Unmade

tim@unmade.media