Whoever is running the digital marketing for the Skittles sweet brand needs to be given a medal. They are clearly pushing the envelope on what a brand can do online and are not afraid of the Wildean maxim “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
In April 2006, well before Twitter launched, the Masterfoods brand sponsored a little-known mobile social sofware site, BuddyPing, to offer users a free account under the ‘Skittles Big Summer’ promotion. The brand then picked up the costs on behalf of users who signed up to the promotion. What happened to that trial I don’t know, but it’s interesting to note that it even happened, because it was never widely promoted. They were clearly testing the water.
Today, they did something else pretty cool. They changed the Skittles home page to show a Skittles logo over-layed above a Twitter search for the word “Skittles”. Before you can see the full page you have to register your age, because they obviously cannot control what people say on Twitter.
I tested this out by Tweeting “Skittles give you cancer and is the cause of all world evil http://skittles.com/” and it duly appeared. That takes guts.
UPDATE: Of course, it may well backfire. Twitterers are starting to game the idea now, e.g.:
UPDATE II: Looks like they’ve been doing this with Wikipedia too.
Very, very clever!
They are also linking to Flickr, Youtube, Wikipedia and facebook for the other links on the Skittles.com site.
To track twittle’s marketing on Flickr, Youtube, and Twitter, see http://twitter.tearn.com/2009/03/skittles.html
Hope that simplifies the first-hand view of their efforts all over the web.
Brilliant strategy! It is also quite risky. Kudos to the people at Skittles!
This is exactly what I warn clients about when it comes to search and tag poisoning. The problem with searching on a basic regular expression without moderation is you can inject all sorts of messages into the queue.
When Reuters were asking people to Twitter questions which they would forward under their account to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Leader of the Conservatives David Cameron. I created the Tweeterator to help moderate question formats and control the content.
Great kudos to the Skittles team for diving in though.
They’ll have known this would happen (well, I would hope they would). Both to Twitter and to Wikipedia. Hopefully the brand are prepared and will ride it out until it returns to the normal level of mentions
My 30 seconds of fame : http://twitpic.com/1sn5i
What’s even scarier is that some folks, primarily Australians so far, have picked up the trend fisting meme from the weekend and have coined #twitterfisting — currently the hottest term on Twitscoop. Erk.
I think that like the “-gate” suffix has been used for every political scandal since Watergate, the “-fisting” suffix now means something like “to disrupt by via Twitter” or “to disrupt with Twitter bots”.
Oops, typo! I meant #skittlefisting. My bad.
What are the laws at play here though? (I have no real clue btw) Could a tweet saying ‘Skittles give you AIDS. Fact.’ be considered libel? Libel fed direct to the Skittles radar…? Small potatoes for them I guess.
The question is… whether Twitter are in on this too.
To quote Todd Dagres, one of their VCs, last week:
“there is a [Twitter] business model – it just hasn’t been implemented yet. All of a sudden there will be some changes that won’t undermine the experience or the vitality — but it will be pretty obvious how we’re going to monetize it.”
Could be…
It’s certainly an interesting experiment. Monumental buzz marketing – but keep in mind it is ‘just’ to the twitter community, so the audience are people who ‘get it’ already. Will be really interesting to see what the mainstream media (ie the world away from twitter) make of it…
Eerm – Ben – you see this if you go to http://www.skittles.com/ – so it’s anyone that goes to their website, not just the Twitter community…
Very risky strategy. I’m up for innovative ideas but to me this appears a little pointless to say the least. If this was a strategy suggested on ‘The Apprentice’ Sir Alan would have shredded the idea to pieces.
Do you agree ?
Raj Anand – Well, we’re all talking about it aren’t we? Chances are mainstream media journos are going to think the whole thing is a mistake, write it up as a joke on Skittles, and thus generate millions of pounds of worth of editorial Mars could never afford to buy. QED.
“millions of pounds of worth of editorial Mars could never afford to buy” — Mike, are you kidding? the Mars company has billions and billions of dollars in cash. The Mars family [McLean, Virginia] is always close to the top on the Forbes’ richest list…
What, exactly, is clever about using someone else’s page with your own logo?
There doesnt seem to be any value in this, maybe wrong and fell free to point any out to me.
Yes they are going to get some age demographic and they are going to get one hell of a lot of traffic, but beyond that I think they are only going to get spam!
Bit like silencelondon.com’s strategy for their music clients a year ago
It’s generated a response so whatever their intention they have got publicity from this
1) They may ask for your DOB, but you can still read the tweets as they go by before you confirm your age. So much for trying to make sure unmoderated content is unavailable to underage kids.
2) I’m not sure the age demographic is relevant here – they’re going to get a bunch of tweeple who don’t care and who IMHO are displaying only a mild interest in what they’re doing, but who are unlikely to go rushing out to the shops. Still, if it’s branding they’re after…
3) As for PR, I guess Twitter is flavour (sorry!) of the month, and they may well generate some additional coverage somewhere because of the integration.
Euros Inflations
von Raivo Pommer-raimo1@hot.ee
Die Lebensversicherung ist in Zeiten der Abgeltungsteuer eine der letzten Anlageformen, die der Fiskus privilegiert. Denn unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen muss der Anleger nur die Hälfte der Erträge beim Finanzamt deklarieren – und das auch erst am Ende der Laufzeit. Selbst wenn dann der persönliche Steuersatz von bis zu 42 Prozent gilt, ist das immer noch günstiger, als alles mit dem Abgeltungsteuersatz von 25 Prozent zu versteuern. Doch vom 1. April an verschärfen sich die Anforderungen für die Bevorzugung.
Dann darf die Lebensversicherung nicht mehr einfach nur eine Geldanlage sein, sondern muss sich wieder ihrem eigentlichen Zweck nähern: der Absicherung der Angehörigen im Todesfall. Dazu wird ein Mindest-Risikoschutz vorgeschrieben, der sich entweder an den eingezahlten Beiträgen, der garantierten Zahlung bei Fälligkeit oder dem Zeitwert orientiert
Sorry. Translation: I am a perverted monkey douche bag and like to hump and be humped by animals. German animals, that is.
The current model for Twitter is doomed to technology problems and at the same time is limiting their business potential.
They re-factor the service as a Real Time Twitter. Here are the details:
http://post.ly/5Mq
Shut-up, you’re boring
Good or bad, traffic is traffic. That’s all they need.
This is probably a clever move on their part. The Skittles brand is already well-developed and stunts like this bring it to the front of our attentions. This trick would be toxic for a less-defined brand, but I can’t imagine that a couple of weeks of associating skittles even with -fisting, is going to do much to a brand that’s been associating itself with happy rainbows for years.
I wouldn’t be surprised if sales are up today and for the next couple of days. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about Skittles. It only takes one of us to feel a perverse inclination to eat their uber-glycolic pellets for the campaign to work…
This is neat, but the fact that we give it so much props makes me want to barf.
This is what happens when people doing the work actually care about what they do. It should be expected as the norm rather than some amazingly wild marketing stunt.
Nicely done but very edgy. Should try it on Twitzu (http://www.twitzu.com) too.
I’m astounded at how many people are asking “What’s the value in this tactic?” Um, in the Attention Economy, with everybody competing for limited human attention, skittles have just got hundreds or thousands of people talking and writing about their brand. That’s the value.
Whether you reckon they got “value for money” is a different question…
This site-in-a-site gimmick was much cooler when Modernista! did it nearly two years ago. http://modernista.com/7/index.php.
I think it was a brilliant move to get some press, but in the long run I don’t think it will accomplish much. The point is to get people to come back to the site. Why would I do that when I can stay on twitter and get the same information myself?
In a few days it will be old news and they’ll have a site that confuses the half of the population that don’t get/use twitter and the other half that do will have moved onto the next big twitter trend.
I liked the idea and did a positive tweet on it. I think Skittles is really smart and courageous to promote a platform that showcases both positive and negative opinions.
i noticed Axe hair/deodorant products website has a link to its wikipedia page instead of copy describing the product line
I love sour skittles.
They can tweet or not all the want.
Top 3 candy in the world.
http://candygurus.blogspot.com/2008/10/sour-skittles.html
I noticed on Twitscoop yesterday that skittles was one of the most popular words but didn’t think anything of it until a colleague directed me to their website.
Interesting move, but I still don’t want to buy amy Skittles
Do people not realize that Twitter isn’t as popular as everyone thinks? Sure a lot more people are using it, but I would venture a guess that Twitter users make up less than 5% of the candy’s target market.
Skittles has made a quatum leap for all social networking sites!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is a brilliant move and a genius marketing
concept. Skittles and twitter should both be applauded for being leaders in a establishing
a new platform, which many will want to get in board with!
I love what they are doing, keep it up, and I want to be next for my magazine:
http://tinyurl.com/6farz3
Praise God!
I’m going to leverage the Skittle tweeter marketing effort into gobs of traffic for my awesome sailing site http://www.raisinganchor.com. No one will suspect me of comment spam!
Hats off to http://www.agency.com/ for running the Skittles “siteless site” campaign. But if you look far back enough in history, you’ll discover that Modernista did the “siteless site” a year ago.
I enjoyed Will Self’s Twitter comment on this:
“I despair: http://skittlefisting.tumblr.com/“
yeah, shame on you Agency.com
skittles, how much did you pay for a stolen idea?
I used to like skittles and hate Agency.com, now I don’t like skittles and despise agency.com, great PR Stunt to prove that you should have shut your doors years ago.
when i’m about to forget about the subway video, here you are again, to remind how awful you are.
Agency.com what a great dis-service to the industry you are.
Mwa hahaha!
I have the #1 spot for skittles on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=skittles&m=text
*rocks*
Gute Aufmachung und tolle Themen – weiter so
I think there have to be psychological tests that we can perform about the nature of the soul, eternity, etc. ,
Whitfield’s version reached the top spot in the UK Singles Chart first, followed swiftly by Laine’s. ,