April, foolish April

April: time for spring, longer days, shorter nights and of course sometimes desparate brand attempts to be funny. But they occasionally are funny.Early April

Some argue he has the skills of a comedian, but what would Trump do if his preferred mouthpiece, Twitter, closed all of a sudden?

Spoof 1: Amazon's Alexa for pets:

Elon Musk's Tesla this week became the second most valuable auto company in the world based on its market capitalisation.

Many see this as evidence of a huge bubble in new tech and so-called 'unicorn' companies.

According to its market capitalisation of $49.1 billion, the company is worth some $300,000 (£240,000) for every vehicle it produces, around four times the sales cost of each actual car.

One reason for its astronomical valuation could be its use of customer data, although some have been critical of the company's ownership of this data for its driverless cars, particularly when there have been crashes.

Perhaps surprisingly, this research suggests that those companies who gobble up the column inches as the market leaders in driverless cars are anything but. We usually associate Tesla, Uber and Google with this technology, but Ford, GM, Nissan, BMW and Daimler (Mercedes) are way ahead.

Spoof 2: Burger King Whopper toothpaste:

A question: is advertising decoration, where opinion matters, or plumbing where expertise matters? Dave Trott opts firmly for the latter.

Bristol’s grammatical vigilante has been terrorising those producing the grocer's apostrophe for some time. The BBC investigates.

The new AOL-Yahoo combined entity will be called ‘Oath’ according to AOL’s Tim Armstrong and he’s pushing the #taketheoath hashtag.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will not be involved, mainly because of the massive data hack, which she has been held responsible for.

Spoof 3: Everyone's favourite opera-singing price comparison mascot/figure/representative unleashes WOW! That what I call compare (Note: funnier than you may imagine):

Google surely has its finger on the pulse? All that data. All that insight. All those clever people.

Then their research into, ‘what teens think is cool’ (NB: Google – the word ‘cool’ isn’t cool) called ‘It’s Lit’ may astonish.

Apparently cool matters, but this research has had savage criticism for its out-of-touch-dad opinions and fashions rescued from the 1980s.

Spoof 4: Paddy Power opens bets for the first seahorse race:

One consequence of the modern age is the falling attention spans of everyone.

Except it's nonsense. Attention spans have not reduced.

One last spoof almost caused a lot of upset. This disastrous April Fool from Turkish chocolate maker Ulker Biskuvi AS prompted Turkey's controversial leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan to suspect a coup attempt, not long since there was a real coup attempt in 2016.

Finally, this is NOT a spoof but because of the timing, some may have thought it was.

Pepsi's new ad has been righty panned for its clumsy attempt to co-opt the #blacklivesmatter movement in order to flog a fizzy drink. Their in-house team produced a real stinker, an entirely overblown, ridiculous ad. So bad the company finally pulled it on Thursday, but you can still see most of it in BI's annotated version below: