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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> It seems every single company and publication that communicates via the web has a corporate communications department or something that thinks it's a corporate priority to come out with something for April Fools.

It's not really the lameness of April Fools Day, it's the lameness of internet businesses, social media marketing, or marketers and salesmen in general. They need to take over, trivialize, devaluate and destroy every thing that becomes special in society, in hope to get some additional sales. I also don't know how to solve this, but April Fools Day is only a more visible than usual demonstration of a problem that happens every single day.

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Even if we ignore the social impact of marketing, it's pretty sad when people who work in communications believe that they are only required to be original once a year.

The original carnival days like "Feast of Fools" [0] were an outlet for subversive undercurrents in the otherwise immobile medieval societies. You could be Pope for a day, but you were still a beggar for the rest of your life and nothing would change that.

Marketers who play April Fools unwittingly paint themselves as the beggar in this scenario. It's like they're broadcasting a message: "I feel like my work has no meaning in this world, but at least today I get to pretend that I'm the one making the news."

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Fools

> "I feel like my work has no meaning in this world, but at least today I get to pretend that I'm the one making the news."

So what you are saying is I should be pulling stupid pranks today...

in hope to get some additional sales

That's a copout, like blaming the legitimately elected political leaders in a democracy.

_People_ do this to holidays and special events because they are easily impressed and inclined to follow social trends like lemmings.

If people weren't so impressed by lameness, then the advertisers and marketers would attempt other ways to gather eyeballs.

I shudder when I think of how unreadable I used to find Slashdot every April 1st (back when I was reading it).

> If people weren't so impressed by lameness, then the advertisers and marketers would attempt other ways to gather eyeballs.

It's a feedback loop; one that is arguably easier to break on the marketer's side. OTOH posts such as OP's complaint are attempt to break that loop on the side of people by signalling that well, we're fed up with crap. I doubt any marketer will listen though.

It would seem to be easier to break the cycle on the marketer's side because you're viewing the problem at the choke point where marketers are ostensibly in control - but really it's a systemic problem with people that would have to be fixed. Fix a couple of marketers and a couple of other marketers step in to fill the void.

Plugging a couple of obvious holes in the dike does no good when the dike is fundamentally unsound.

I think you're right.

So this leads to an obvious question: how do we fix the dike?

In general or with regards to April Fool's?

In general, the same way it's always done: years of social activism, patient stating and re-stating of your case to an uncaring public who is barely impacted by your position, possible civil disobedience (though I have no idea what form that would take in this context... Being told by our employer to roll out an April Fool's project and responding "No, it's a waste of our time and our customers' time, I'm not doing it" perhaps).

With regards to April Fool's: I wouldn't bother. It's a once-a-year annoyance, not nearly as disruptive as Christmas. If your goal is to encourage people to knock off nonsense, than I'd easily start with the pagan-holiday-cum-Christian-nativity-celebration-cum-marketing-extravaganza that we hold every December; it's far more disruptive to the economy and people's psychological well-being.

If you find April Fool's too annoying, take a personal day and tune out; go read a book, go on a walk, take the disruption of functional communication on the Internet as an opportunity to step back from the Internet. Use the opportunity to look around at the world outside the screen and see what needs improvement; maybe you'll come back on April 2nd inspired.

Short of the hope that medical advances and genetic engineering will bootstrap a dramatic increase in human intelligence... I got nothing but observations on the futility of the problem.

Simple - stop giving them your attention. If no one paid attention to it, it wouldn't work. If it didn't work, no rational management would foot the bill for it.

You're missing the feedback loop. Marketers will keep trying stuff until they find something we pay attention to. And they will destroy its specialness in the process.

If people weren't so impressed by lameness, then the advertisers and marketers would attempt other ways to gather eyeballs

There is alien life out there, organized into a federation. Their technology is so advanced to ours that remaining invisible to us is trivial. In order for our species to qualify for membership, we must first survive a series of evil pranks designed to kill or intellectually stultify us in the most darkly ironic way possible.

This is why we have automobiles, nuclear weapons, and April Fools.

Yep, this is it. Neutered culture intended for mass consumption, right down to the utterly safe, whimsical April Fool's Day gag -- "wow, $CORP is so random!"

An April Fool gag, even if carried out by a corp can be funny if it is truly random. I got fooled by the BigCorp I contract to when they put up a makeshift sign up asking us to consider covering our faces, because the parking had been fumigated ("although we expect it to be safe"). It played right into our prejudices about the declining health and safety culture in my country.

The problem, in my opinion, with gags like Google's is that they are utterly predictable. They are safe, and have no "edge" - which is sensible, since they don't want to alienate customers, but utterly fail as jokes.

What if April Fool's jokes were actually funny ...

I think half the annoyance is most of the time, unfunny people reveal themselves on this day.

It's not possible to be genuinely funny when the real objective is defined by traffic and 'clout' metrics.

What's more lame, a business trying to attract attention to itself with humor, or a person trying to attract attention to himself or herself by loudly proclaiming how above it all they are?

What do you mean "a person"? This is all I know about "hoodoof":

user: hoodoof created: 1055 days ago karma: 704 avg: 1.51 about:

not really the lameness of April Fools Day, it's the lameness of internet businesses, social media marketing, or marketers and salesmen in general. They need to take over, trivialize, devaluate and destroy every thing that becomes special in society, in hope to get some additional sales.

They're not different than anyone who's ever done marketing, it's just that most single individuals in industrialized nations have almost effortless access to potential audiences only Popes and heads of state had several hundred years ago. Ever been in an open air marketplace? In a lot of places in the world, everyone is shouting in the marketplace.

Another of Garret Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons"

I agree with all your points, except for the generalisation on marketers and salespeople. Not all of them are like car salesmen or self proclaimed marketing gurus. Some really care about the product they are selling and the people they are selling to.

I am a CTO in a startup, and everyday I'm either selling an idea within the company, or selling a product to customers. All this back and forth produces great insights on the software we're developing as well as in the business itself. I wouldn't be able to do this kind of thing if I hand't learned valuable lessons selling surf and skateboard goods on my family business back when I was a teenager. Also, around the same time I started a t-shirt business with a cousin which instantly got me interested in graphic design, and marketing. I did all that while programming on the side as I still do nowadays.

Sales is all about serving the customer. Marketing is all about conquering the customer by heart, and message. Both skills are of extreme importance in any business, specially in startups. Instead of bashing, we should embrace these disciplines.

After all, we can only profit from them.

> Instead of bashing, we should embrace these disciplines.

I'm happy to embrace honest selling, but that seems to be a completely different mindset than most of the sales I saw. If your product is really good and provides value to the customer (instead of trying to extract value out of a customer), then the salesman/marketer has an easier job in 'conquering our hearts', and doesn't need to resort to mental hacks or things that are plainly annoying. I'm happy to pay more for such a product, sold by honest people.

What's your startup, by the way? :).

I have to agree with you on many cases — but I would take exception for the most successful attempts, namely this year: Google Maps’ Pokemon hunt, and a couple others.

When operated by communication offices with little contact with the company’s culture, like most attempt, it falls flat. Otherwise, those can be very representative of a company’s culture, and I would recommend checking their last prank before applying to a company (if you expect to have the luxury to choose). It you think it’s funny, edgy, or demonstrate an expertise, than yes, you might be on track.

A couple of GMail’s pranks have been illustrative of that: creepy to people without knowledge of databases, yet funny because obviously non-scalable to people familiar with large on-line structure.

Humour is by far the most revealing element of anyone’s culture, and that’s why I like questions like ‘Tell me a joke’ during interviews — although, to be honest, I’ve only asked it when being the interviewee.

This. Every single holiday. Is The Same. Problem.

Here here! Contrived holidays => corporate profit. What isn't contrived these days? But I guess many of us work at these places so...

Well, hopefully the engineering team is taking part too. This can be used for fun company culture AND marketing.

I just can't give enough +'s for that - well said.