Skittles go social
They may be disgusting balls of sugar and food colouring but Skittles have really embraced social media with their US site.
The home page is a twitter fall-type page which shows real-time comments from people about Skittles. The product listings page takes you to the Skittles Wikipedia entry. Videos takes you Skittles on You Tube. Photos takes you to Skittles on Flickr. Click on “friends” and it takes you to the Skittles Facebook fan page.
This is simultaneously innovative and boring.
It is innovative because it relies on minimal marketing spin and really puts social media at the heart of the campaign. It leaves no where to hide and puts users at the forefront of the experience – their comments, input and connections are truely driving this campaign.
However, coming to this cold, I find the lack of narrative a bit of an issue. Without any thing driving a story it just seems to be a collection of different bits of the internet being dragged into one place without a purpose. It’s not pushing me further along a narrative with Skittles, it’s just like a directory listing.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. I haven’t seen the offline campaign so don’t know how this site fits in. Also, FMCG always find it difficult to offer added value online. Their online campaigns normally stretch to a flash-heavy site with some sort of mini-game. If this is just a small part of a big ATL campaign then this might work well – encouraging people to simply talk about/interact with the campaign and the brand to multiple the offline impact. If this is the case then it might work well. However, I do think that Creme Egg have done digital cross platform campaigns better in the past (though this year’s campaign is looking a bit lack luster).
Congratulations must go to Skittles though for having the confidence to do this.
Tags: skittles, social media
adverts, digial, social media | admin | 
March 2, 2009 4:51 pm
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By amelia, April 29, 2009 @ 11:40 am
Have a look on Google trends and after a brief spike in search for the week of launch, it now seems to have died down to actually lower than before they did this social media activity!