Dogs in bras, football robots all April fools
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BOGUS ad campaigns, a failed prank by Google, Ivy League football robots and an attempt at humor on the fraught presidential campaign trail competed for attention in the United States yesterday, traditionally a day of hoaxes and spoofs.
The trick on April Fools’ Day, which falls on April 1 each year, is to be outlandish yet somewhat plausible.
“It gets more and more challenging to stand out,” said Rachael King, spokeswoman for ThirdLove, a lingerie maker that partnered with DogVacay, a pet sitting service, to unveil a fake line of dog brassieres.
The online campaign features photographs of dogs wearing bras and gazing off into the distance.
Celebrity shenanigans on YouTube figured prominently in the mix this year. Rapper Snoop Dogg used the video service to introduce a fake “SnoopaVision” virtual reality experience, said Lauren Verrusio, spokeswoman for Google, which owns YouTube.
New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College, which last year began using a robotic tackling dummy it called “MVP” in an effort to reduce the number of hits its players absorb during practice sessions, said the robots would be used in games from next season.
“In the future, we’ll line up 11 MVPs and they’ll compete in the games for us. It’s a wonderful opportunity. Our players will execute their responsibilities by remote control,” Head Football Coach Buddy Teevens said in a tongue-in-cheek video.
The film showed a robot failing at football drills including running stairs and catching passes.
Google gaffe
Google unveiled a feature called “Mic Drop” that ended e-mails with an image of a minion character from the “Despicable Me” animated films and prevented recipients from replying.
The company quickly turned off the feature amid online criticism.
Republican presidential candidate and US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas also joined in, first tweeting that rival Donald Trump accepted his one-on-one debate invite and then saying the tweet was intended as a joke.
Another prank promoted “Jobs for Babies,” a new service to help the diaper set find their dream jobs, said Tierney Oakes, a spokeswoman for Beck Media & Marketing, which created video for ZipRecruiter, an online job posting service.
Babies are shown pounding on computer keyboards and crawling out of elevators as the video explains particular skills: learning 10 times faster than an adult, quickly picking up languages and staying awake at all hours of the night.
Even the village of Lake Placid, New York, the home of the 1980 Winter Olympics, got into the act.
It ran gag versions of its tourism newsletter on an online blog that said the town is “embracing” the idea of road-deicing salt leaching into groundwater and turning its beloved Mirror Lake into saltwater.
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