Before the general context and behavior of big companies was very serious. You know you had your GE, IBM, Ford, I don't know P&G, big serious companies that wear ties and white shirts. And you make a parody of them and becomes kind of obvious. Oh look "Big Brother Inside" logo for Intel. Ok clearly a parody.
However, I feel, there is this movement toward lightheartedness and humor in the new style of PR. Google is the prototypical company here. Bright childish colors. "Oh look the rainbow! Blue, green, red colorful beach balls in every office!". That was their initial image. "We are just big kids playing and building cool stuff". Or say, April 1st comes, and here is Google making fun of their products. Releasing something like "Google Fiber over Toilet Plumbing" (get it, get it, fiber, toilet, ..., make sure to tweet it!). Something like that. So that is all jolly good, except that by using lightheartedness and parody as a standard PR tool, now it is not easily differentiated from other parody out there. Maybe environmentalists make a site about Google's Fiber Toilet Plumbing. Now it is kind of harder to tell the difference.
Anyway, this is too much drivel. Not defending or taking sides, just pointing out what seems like an interesting pattern developing.
Leave it to internet companies to turn a fun day with small hidden easter eggs into a day of cringeworthy bad jokes plastered all over the web.
Ten aprils fools. That's ten days. It took ten days to run a perfectly fun day into a day where a lot of people would rather stay to listen to Rush Limbaugh read the phonebook than go on any website, at any point of the day.
I think it's inherently impossible for an megaentity existing purely for monetary gain to seem lighthearted and human. I wish they'd stop trying.
Before the general context and behavior of big companies was very serious. You know you had your GE, IBM, Ford, I don't know P&G, big serious companies that wear ties and white shirts. And you make a parody of them and becomes kind of obvious. Oh look "Big Brother Inside" logo for Intel. Ok clearly a parody.
However, I feel, there is this movement toward lightheartedness and humor in the new style of PR. Google is the prototypical company here. Bright childish colors. "Oh look the rainbow! Blue, green, red colorful beach balls in every office!". That was their initial image. "We are just big kids playing and building cool stuff". Or say, April 1st comes, and here is Google making fun of their products. Releasing something like "Google Fiber over Toilet Plumbing" (get it, get it, fiber, toilet, ..., make sure to tweet it!). Something like that. So that is all jolly good, except that by using lightheartedness and parody as a standard PR tool, now it is not easily differentiated from other parody out there. Maybe environmentalists make a site about Google's Fiber Toilet Plumbing. Now it is kind of harder to tell the difference.
Anyway, this is too much drivel. Not defending or taking sides, just pointing out what seems like an interesting pattern developing.