I absolutely hate April Fools’ Day. I pretty much always have. It’s probably my least favorite day of the year—outside of those times when the Yankees beat the Red Sox. [related]
I thought, given the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, we’d be spared from some of the dumb product pitches and fake news stories that have cluttered far too many sites—including our own on occasion—in recent years, but I learned today at least one company is going forward with its April Fools’ Day plans.
I may be in the minority, but I think this is a bad idea on a couple of fronts: in addition to my disdain for the holiday and its infiltration into the media over the years, I also don’t think it’s the right time for us to be making light in an industry that’s experiencing large-scale layoffs and project and event cancellations.
It’s bad enough we have companies that are tailoring their product pitches in a way that they’re trying to capitalize on a worldwide health crisis, but attempting to add humor to it strikes me as just a bad idea, to say the very least. Is that really the way you want people to remember your company?
To be clear, my objection to April Fools’ Day started long before this year, but I think the addition of a global health crisis on top of my longstanding feelings on fake news make the timing particularly poor for a marketing agency to be rolling out its tongue-in-cheek products.
Perhaps my feelings about April Fools’ Day crystallized during my college newspaper days when we ran a few fake stories in the issue that happened to come out on April 1 that year and asked students and readers to try to figure out which were the fake stories.
Most people couldn’t do it and that made me think we were simply confusing readers, which is obviously not what you want to be doing as a purveyor of news. To this day, I wonder about the necessity to make our customers wonder what’s real and what’s not on our site even one day a year.
Chief content officer Jason Knott challenged my assertion that it’s a bad time for April Fools’ Day stories, noting we all need a little levity in our lives during this pandemic. My feeling is it’s a bad idea to ever introduce doubt in your readers’ minds that what you’re telling them is true, so I’ll steer clear.
Long History of April Fools’ Day Hatred
Some people will probably think this means I don’t like fun and can’t handle humor in any situation. One Twitter friend called me a Grinch for my anti-April Fools’ stance. I won’t point out the obvious crossover of holidays in that response but will note anyone who knows me well has heard my dry wit regularly.
I’m hardly the most boisterous or obviously humorous person in the room but have been known to regularly sprinkle my sarcasm in at just the right time to make the group I’m in with explode in laughter. I was also the driving force on a fake issue of CI we gave Tom LeBlanc when he left in August.
I know most people are fans of satire-based sites such as The Onion, but I always wonder why the people behind those stories don’t take their obvious storytelling power and use it to tell true stories no one else has or can. I’m not questioning their skills. It’s more about their motivation.
In an era where the phrase “fake news” is thrown around like it’s not an oxymoron, the last thing I want to do is to ever have Commercial Integrator readers wondering if something we posted on our site is rooted in fact or just completely fabricated.
That’s probably an abundance of caution, but that’s OK with me. I’d rather we be known for the scoops we get and the in-depth research we do on our features than for some fabricated story we posted that fooled someone enough to ask us where they can order a product that doesn’t exist.
I know that, by writing this piece, I’m setting myself up to be pranked relentlessly on April 1 of this year and probably every other year going forward, but I’ve adopted the approach that if your announcement comes on April 1, it’s probably not real anyway.
(Side note to AVI-SPL and Whitlock: please don’t announce your completed $1.3 billion merger on Wednesday, even if that’s the day you actually finalize it.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an oddly-shaped can of peanuts to open. My 11-year-old daughter just handed it to me out of the blue and walked away giggling. I don’t know why she’s laughing so hard or why she thinks I need a snack right this very second.
