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April Fools 2013: The Round-up

April 1st is upon us, and that can only mean one thing: pranks, gags, and joke products of dubious comedic value, as the tech world tries to make you crack a smile.  Whether you love it or loath it, April Fools is inescapable, so join us as we run through 2013′s cons …

SlashGear Chris Davies

Context & Ripple Effects

Tech outlets had already turned April Fools’ Day into a recurring coverage format, from the 2011 big list of tech jokes to a 2012 effort to catalog and debunk them. This 2013 round-up reflects a repeatable annual attention event rather than a single company announcement.

The same-day coverage includes dedicated collections of Google’s jokes and posts tied to Bing, Samsung, Virgin and The Pirate Bay, showing that participation extended across major consumer-tech brands and services.

First-order effects

  • Tech companies named in the round-up receive a low-cost, time-bound channel for brand visibility, while publishers compete to aggregate and contextualize a fragmented stream of pranks.
  • Readers must distinguish joke announcements from ordinary product news on a day when credible-looking claims are deliberately mixed with satire.

Second-order effects

  • Google, Bing, Samsung, Virgin and The Pirate Bay face a shared incentive to make jokes distinctive enough to break through the volume of competing April Fools material.
  • Tech publishers gain a recurring traffic and curation opportunity, but their editorial role shifts toward verification and labeling as much as entertainment.

Third-order effects

  • If annual participation continues, April Fools’ Day becomes a predictable branded-media ritual in which attention is allocated by distribution and recognizability rather than product substance.
  • The ritual also normalizes a short annual period of lower trust in product messaging, increasing the value of clear sourcing and contextual coverage for publishers.

The trend: April Fools’ Day is developing into an annual tech-marketing and publisher-curation cycle built around attention, parody and verification.

Related: April Fools · April Fools 2012: We Ruin Every (Tech-Related) Joke On The Internets

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