However, by midday those who had signed up for the deal were informed via email that they had been subjected to an April Fool’s Day prank. The prize could be claimed by using the code ‘SLOOFLIRPA’ when signing up for a subscription to the Bier Club, recipients were told.Īccording to one Twitter user, the promotional message was also sent to customers by text, which alleviated some concerns that the deal might be a “scam”. With the subject line ‘URGENT: You’ve Won a Black Card!’, customers received an email today (1 April) from Bier Company co-founders Stefan White and Thomas Renshaw informing them they were “this month’s winner free beer for life”. If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.An April Fool’s Day promotion by beer subscription brand Bier Company has backfired, with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) receiving at least 40 complaints within hours of the prank being revealed.Ĭustomers of the Bier Company were tricked into believing they had won the company’s longstanding monthly competition to win a ‘black card’, which gives them a free lifetime subscription to the ‘Bier Club’.īlack card winners receive a free delivery of eight beers each month, as well as free delivery sitewide, access to members’ areas with ‘early bird’ prices, a gold-plated members-only Craftmaster glass, and a personalised, gold-engraved black members card. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.) That’s why, even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. It’s important that we have several ways we make money, just like it’s important for you to have a diversified retirement portfolio to weather the ups and downs of the stock market. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world - not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on.įirst, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism? The amount of storage Gmail offered was so unprecedented at the time that many people assumed the product was just another company prank, like the lunar research station it announced the same day.īut Gmail is no longer a joke, and Google is no longer a scrappy startup - its parent company, Alphabet, is the world's most valuable company, and it's learning that it can't always afford to make a joke users might not get. When the company announced Gmail, it was on April 1 with a conversational, unserious-sounding press release. Google has been doing April Fools' jokes since 2000, not long after the company was founded. The "mic drop" uproar shows how pranks are viewed differently when they come from a corporate behemoth rather than a scrappy startup. Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs." Google ended up apologizing: "Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. "April fools jokes are great fun but not when they affect my business correspondence and increase the chance of something serious occurring like not seeing my clients' responses to important emails," another wrote. "I can't afford for you clowns to mess around with my business." "I use gmail for my one-man business," one wrote on Google's forums. The "mic drop" button was in the same spot where the "send and archive" button usually is, and thanks to muscle memory, plenty of people ended up clicking it who didn't intend to. April Fools' Day is barely underway, and Google has already had a joke backfire: A "mic drop" button in Gmail that inserted a GIF from the Minions movies into an email reply, and then hid all subsequent replies, ended up infuriating people who use their Gmail for professional reasons.
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