Some people love April Fool’s Day, others hate. Who definitely loves it? Big companies and their ad geniuses. Here’s what they came up with this year.
- Google always creates several gags. This time, they converted their Google Maps interface into a Pokemon-themed map. They further announced that Google Maps was looking to hire a “Pokemon Master” and that potential applicants were instructed to “catch” as many of the video game critters as they could by 2 p.m. on April 1.
- More from Google: On its Gmail program, a new “selfie” background option was unveiled, and Google’s social media site Google+ introduced the option to insert David Hasselhoff into all photos.
Domino’s Pizza unveiled “Edibox,” an edible pizza box and a “world first in ‘snackaging’ innovation.”
- Cheetos announced Cheetau, a “dangerously cheesy” Cheetos-scented perfume.
Campbell’s announced that Spaghetti O’s would soon become “Spaghetti Squares.”
- The crowdsourcing site Crowdtilt posted a listing for a goofy $25 million “land development project” located 65 miles off the coast of California. Dubbed “Silicon Island,” it promised investors a paradise free from pesky stuff like regulations and taxes where only Bitcoin would be used for currency. The listing also said that meals would be routinely flown in from the mainland via drones.
- Educational language software publisher Rosetta Stone claimed that they had created a program to teach people how to speak Klingon. They even got Michael Dorn, the actor who played Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation, to appear in a video prank.
- Hulu prominently advertised a new “exclusive web series”: A spinoff of NBC’s Hannibal, which is about the cannibalistic serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs, called Cooking With Hannibal.
- In other food-meets-online TV news, Netflix posted a movie called Rotisserie Chicken. Similar to the “Yule log” that airs on TV stations every Christmas, Rotisserie Chicken consists entirely of a chicken, rotating on a spit. It’s 73 minutes long – we dare you to watch the whole thing.