Quite a bit of buzz has popped up around the new Skittles.com over the weekend and today. If you haven’t seen the site, it’s based on leveraging different social-media sites linked together by a very simple menu navigation that floats on any of the sites. For example, the home page and “chatter” section is the brand’s Twitter page, the video media page is the brand’s YouTube page, the video images page is the brand’s Flickr stream, and the “friends” section is the Facebook fan-page profile.
This is almost certainly inspired by Modernista’s brilliant redesign from about a year ago. Does that matter? Definitely not. Modernista had it right then and now Skittles does too. Skittles has unabashedly made the bold leap into accepting they can’t control the way their brand is defined in today’s social web and can only try their best to participate in the conversation. They’re taking the good with the bad, and I can assure you all that good is going to dramatically outweigh the bad.
If you want an easy indicator of how this site does, check out the number of Facebook friends it already has in place (an impressive 582,604 at the time of this post). Other measurements, such as the number of comments it has on its YouTube videos and images, and general comments and sentiments can also be helpful indicators, but I think the Facebook figure serves at the simplest indicator for most casual observers.
The reality is, Skittles has done this completely right. This solution was quick to produce, leverages existing communities that have great interest in the product and creates a platform that further engages the consumer. I would recommend any brand with minimal budget and the right kind of audience drop the brand sites they currently have, which I’m guessing aren’t terribly effective. The problem is that such a scenario raises an interesting dilemma.
What happens if everyone shifts their current strategy and starts launching these kinds of sites? Don’t worry — it isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but some trends will develop.
In a nutshell, I think the novelty will wear off for a lot of consumers. These people certainly want their social media and a big part of a brand’s focus will be on creating great quality websites that encourage discussion, communication and participation. The social-media aspects will be achieved by using the web services and integration tools of sites like Facebook. Deep integration with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will become more prevalent and brands with budgets will use all of these social features that Skittles has embraced.
However, while social aspects will become more prevalent, brands will keep in mind that consumers also like their sites to be nicely packaged. Moving forward, businesses will create sites with a far higher level of aesthetic value and will work to make sure they retain the ability to at least control the brand visually. They will also differentiate as they always have with great creative and fun concepts that leverage these same social communities. Sites will also be more conscious of usability and not adding complex layers that inhibit the social functions of the third party web services like Flickr, YouTube or Twitter — which are frequently botched today.
I don’t think the age of the microsite is over. The successful microsites, both low and high budget, will undoubtedly have one thing in common: a simple open infrastructure for integrating into popular web communities and leveraging their social nature.
Again, I commend Agency.com for paying attention to great ideas, Modernista for doing it first, but most importantly Skittle’s brand team for having the courage to get out there and embrace the web and the new creative process so wholeheartedly. (Of course, Team Skittles could be terrified to death. But, um, congrats anyway…)
March 4th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Sure, ad people and marketing people are talking about it, but is anyone else? Does it matter? Most of the Tweats are “what this means for marketing.” And what about the myriad bogus postings on the facebook site talking about what a “brilliant” marketing campaign this was? That just reeks. This isn’t a solution: it’s just an attempt to co-opt every web-based tool-du-jour and it feels very “me-too!” And let’s be real: skittles aren’t a product you dream of, plan to buy (generally), or research. It’s candy. You don’t have conversations about skittles, you don’t have meaningful experiences with skittles, you have quick fixes with them and maybe contemplate different ways to eat them or combine them. And then the bag is empty and the experience over. This just looks like MBAs run amok.
Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean that you should. Good things happen organically…and this feels utterly contrived.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Hi Brad,
I’ve spent the good portion of my recent career working on brands like Guinness, Coca-Cola, vitaminwater, Slim Jim, Burn, Fanta, PowerAde, Mentos, Wrigley, etc…
Seemingly all things you’d never imagine people talking about, but amazingly they are. They’re mentioning it in passing and sometimes as the focus of conversations in all kinds of places across the web. You’d be truly suprised.
The Skittles.com site isn’t a campaign for me. It’s not about getting people talking. (Although it has in our marketing community without a doubt.) Skittles.com is a brand site. The campaigns that skittles.com does through out the year should be what generate buzz and when they do create buzz that buzz will be captured and shared at the main brand site.
Check out their fan site on Facebook. They didn’t get over half a million fans after this site was created. They existed long before (which probably caused their enthusiasm in this idea).
I don’t think anyone is expecting skittles magazine to come out anytime soon dedicated to fanaticism about the product, but the reality is skittles amuse people enough everyday to cause them to talk about it even what might be viewed as inane ways. Trust me, I’ve seen it about far more meaningless and less inspiring products.
This site, used properly, in conjunction with great campaign work will be a big hit for them.
Feel free to email me or call me anytime. I’m happy to talk about it at length.
Thanks for having a strong opinion – I can never fault you for that!
-Freddie
March 10th, 2009 at 10:10 am
You know, you’ve got some good points and I think I’d be too
narrow-minded to ignore them. I really want to be excited about this,
and I think that maybe I can be. I’m a skittles fan and have been
since I was…8? When Modernista released their site, it was
like–whoa, cool. For a bunch of dudes who did slick TV spots for gas
guzzlers, it was a shock, and a pleasant one at that. This skittles
stuff felt a bit forced–or at least the Twitter portion did. I
understand Twitter, but I doubt I’ll tweat. It’d just be “Brad’s going
to go play soccer” or “Brad looked dumb at rugby practice” or “Brad is
watching the UFC with rednecks.” Which, granted, could be amusing in
its own right. But I’m really interested in the possibility of Twitter
being a super-charged version of Wiki Answers. More on that later
though.
Advertising or “branding” can be a tough thing to justify to your
average C-level guy. So, one of the ways I explain it is, having a
good brand requires you to do less busy work. You spend less time and
money trying to convince a person to buy whatever it is you’re
selling. What most execs don’t see is just how damn hard it is to get
to that point. They see the evangelism of companies with tremendous
brand equity and forget about the discipline required to achieve the
same things. And these days, the path isn’t clear at all. You can’t
follow a formula or stick to a routine. You’re hosed if you do that.
By virtue of the fact that skittles is DOING this, and
being that mobile and that nimble? Goes a long way for them. My personal reaction isn’t that important here. I loved what you said about how skittles knows they can’t control their brand–this hits at something else I wonder about constantly: ownership and how it’s increasingly difficult to own things. Whenever I see someone tightening their grip on some “precious” commodity, I’m like, “dude, let it go. You’re wearing yourself out on something you can’t possibly hold onto.” Reversing course on that line of thinking will require a lot of effort, but it’s necessary.
Bottom line is…we’re lucky to be working in such a fascinating, challenging time.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Unfortunately the campaign implementation fell down. Skittles was marred by inexcusable usability issues – issues addressed previously in Modernista’s approach – and a blunt legal department imposed age checker that actually turned the experience into that of a site that happened to pull other sites into itself. But beyond this what actually let it down was the fact that it was actually a great mechanic rather than a conversation. Skittles provoked a lot of conversation but had nothing to say. There was nothing beyond the brand name. There was nothing to channel the crowd’s interest. The content stimulus was weak and so it was filled and abused by people who like to swear in public.
The campaign’s relative merits are still being debated online thus adding to its success in generating more attention than a traditional microsite focused campaign could do on a similar budget. In effect, it made us look, now what?
Despite these failings Skittles can still be seen as an important step forward by a big FMCG brand in its use of interactive marketing. Skittles recognised that there is an internet beyond the “marketing web”, where real people exist outside of brand control. There are platforms being used by real people that are “their territory” and they are far better than any “walled garden” faux-social network that most brands could afford to build.
It is fragmented campaigns like Skittles that offer an effective and more interesting future for interactive marketing – campaigns that reflect what people are doing in the real world and the digital world.
Real people’s identities are scattered across services, sites and functions on the internet and digitally enabled devices. As new tools, trends and fads have developed so has the multitude of places where elements of our identity can be accessed. We have become the “fragments shored against [our] ruin”, the comments we have made, the transactions we have completed and the user accounts we have collected or even forgotten that we had. As UnHub, a consumer service inspired by the Skittles campaign which will let you create your own personal Skittles-type experience, puts it: You are Everywhere.