If there were ever a book written entitled "How To Spend Money While Not Selling Candy", chapter one would probably be "Turn your website into the brief object of fascination of people using another service, who have the collective attention span of an ADHD squirrel hopped up on crystal meth".
P.S. Did anyone even notice they linked their product pages to Wikipedia? I'm thinking that sounded very hip and progressive at the planning meeting.
It is hip and progressive: they're sacrificing an opportunity to present their products in the best light possible, and are instead trusting the general public to describe them. To me that's a huge display of confidence in their product.†
You say Skittles is wasting money and misdirecting effort, but it seems opposite. How much does this gimmick actually cost? All the content is hosted and delivered (and in some cases created) by other people. Skittles' site wasn't popular before and the next couple days will get a lot of hip people thinking about Skittles, so it's seems like a great move.
† It's also not that big a deal since it's, you know, candy, which usually puts people in a good mood. I doubt most makers of consumer electronics would display unfiltered commentary from their customers.
Of course, every time a company engages in a publicity stunt like this, the same debate we're all having takes place.
Pro: "Wow, what a great campaign!"
Con: "Pshaw, it's just a gimmick."
Pro: "Oh really? It got you talking about it, didn't it? So clearly it must be working."
Con: "Grrrrrr..."
The only reason why we're having this discussion here, on Hacker News, is they happened to choose flavor of the month Twitter as the focus of the stunt. Wow, so they have the ability to discern what the hottest meme on the web right now is.
They could have also given Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a million dollars to shave the Skittles logo on the back of their children's heads. If they had done so, no one would here would give a shit, but I can guarantee you the message boards at Perez Hilton and celebritybabies.com would be lighting up with the exact same conversation we're having here.
You will convince me that this is something more than a gimmick if one month from now ANYBODY is still taking about this or visiting that page. Actually, if they're even still USING the Twitter stream as their home page a month now I will be halfway convinced.
You're right that it's a publicity stunt. But is that a bad thing?
Yes, if their goal is to make their website popular in the longterm and a hot destination on the web. But what if their goal is just to garner some publicity? This did that.
Also, publicity stunt implies a lack of substance, but I think the near complete outsourcing of their site and image management really is an interesting event. (And probably other people do too, so in the next couple weeks people will write blog posts about whether this is a turning point on the web or whatever – and each one of these posts will mention Skittles. A few months from now there might be a newspaper or magazine article about it, which would reach a different set of people.)
So it is a gimmick, but a genuinely interesting one that didn't cost much and will probably sell a few more bags of Skittles.
I just disagree with you that it is interesting at all. It has the illusion of interestingness because it's about Twitter -- hey, it's web! it's Twitter! i do that stuff for a living! -- but it is completely lacking in substance.
What do I mean by this? I mean you will not see any other company following their lead. Because there is no point in doing this if you take away the novelty and the chatter in the blogosphere...I mean it's not a meaningful way to communicate with people via your site's home page.
Sorry, but it's also just facile. It's so stupidly easy to come up with gimmicks like this that fit the flavor of the month. Hey, it's 2002, let's turn our home page into the Google search results page for "skittles"! Hey, it's 2005, let's make our home page a wiki and allow anyone to edit it! Hey, it's 2006, let's turn our home page into a Youtube video stream of videos tagged "skittles"!
So it's 2009, and they chose Twitter. Sorry, but there is just nothing original or interesting about that.
This is a huge, huge branding win the Skittles guy. Thousands upon thousands of people who would never visit their site (I mean, who the hell visits a website for a candy?) are not only visiting but immediately talking about it to all their friends. Skittles on Facebook has nearly 600,000 fans, more than John McCain, who I assure you spent a LOT more money trying to get people to like him.
Sure, people will say stupid stuff and try to mess with it. But the majority of people are saying funny or at least neutral stuff, and are drowning them out -- just like in the real world. The confidence in the resilience of their brand and in the technology behind this is impressive. These people Get It, get it even more than some readers of Hacker News.
Skittles on Facebook has nearly 600,000 fans, more than John McCain, who I assure you spent a LOT more money trying to get people to like him.
Well, that's not entirely fair. Most of the people using Facebook are what, 14-22? Definitely in the Skittles demographic. In the McCain demographic? Not so much.
No, this is definitely selling candy. People are talking about Skittles. That sells candy. Also, I'm betting that this was very, very cheap relative to other means of marketing.
I can only think of one other use for a website of a brand of food items: informing the visitor of other products under the same brand or made by the same company that the visitor might not know about. This design does a poor job of doing that, but I think a web site can be a trendy topic of discussion as well as informative if it's done the right way.
From the little I know about marketing, most of the techniques that aren't pay-per-click/action are largely faith-based initiatives. I don't see why this would be less effective than an interesting TV advertisement.
This is a powerful idea in that they've directly inserted themselves into the online conversation. That Twitter search stream aside, the rest of the content they have are pretty much regulated and closed despite being owned by a third party. YouTube has moderator tools, Flickr has moderator tools, Facebook fan pages have moderator tools. And Wikipedia is pretty darn hard to fuck with.
So, really, the only thing they don't have a direct control of is that Twitter search stream. However, Twitter is spending a lot of time right now deleting Skittles spam--I know this from personal experience!--and non-relevant tweets. I'm sure for Ev and team, Skittles is yet another big deal and they wouldn't want to fuck it up.
All in all, I really think this is genius and they're quite safe at protecting their brand's value.
Because it's all they have going. Anybody who wants to find out about Skittles has to go to these pages, which means that the public controls Skittle's web site, to some degree.
Not at all, it's just plain old PR. Any PR is good PR, remember?
Okay, it's a fun campaign and kudos to the agency for talking them into it - but I don't see anything earth shattering behind the smoke and mirrors.
the public controls Skittle's web site, to some degree.
Well, if that's what gets you guys so worked up then you'll be in for a disappointment. The flickr and youtube streams are owned by skittles - no public control. The wikipedia page is (predictably) already protected and will probably stay that way for the time being.
So what's left is the twitter stream, which is basically an animated wallpaper with the occassional bit of foul language.
Hm. Sorry, as said, nice little PR stunt and reasonably executed - but I don't see anyone talking about this in 4 weeks. In fact, expect skittles.com to change back to the classic marketing look once the little hype has worn off.
I think you're missing how clever this is. #skittles is the #1 trending topic on search.twitter.com. If you're at all plugged in, you can't get away from this.
Just how many bags of candy do you think they'll have to sell for this idea to pay for itself?
I don't think it's earth-shattering, either, but what does that have to do with anything?
I think you're missing how clever this is. #skittles is the #1 trending topic on search.twitter.com
What is the value of being the #1 trending topic on twitter?
Will they sell more skittles because people read about it on twitter?
I somehow doubt it...
If you're at all plugged in, you can't get away from this.
About 99.6% of internet users beg to disagree (that's the percentage of users who don't have a twitter account). Now, as an exercise, try to extrapolate the total reach of this campaign in terms of real world sales.
I don't think it's earth-shattering, either, but what does that have to do with anything?
Well, when I posted my comment the thread was full of people praising this mashup like the second coming. I just wondered if I missed something essential, but apparently this is just a similar effect to the twitter phenomena. - Lots of buzz and little substance.
Can we arrange for you to come back in a week and give us an update on the state of the Skittle era?
I think it will be instructive, in much the same fashion as I think anybody trying to make money on the Internet should be willing to give the Pets.com marketing plan a few minutes of their time. I'm sure when some marketers saw the $1.2 million sock puppet Superbowl ad they were convinced a new era had dawned, a cult hero had been born, and they were about to sell a lot of dog food.
Usually I agree with the cynical stuff you say, but in this case the hype is warranted. No, it's not going to change things forever, but it's an incredible leap for a company that very few people would have seen this coming from, and the fact that a company is giving themselves up to the cloud is pretty damn impressive.
I don't know how citation works in these cases, but I think you should get credit for bringing this story to everybody's attention on IRC before it got submitted.
HN user Mazy actually pinged me about it first and based on the Twitter search results it seems quite a few figured it out a couple minutes prior. Overall, awesome news is awesome news.
I wonder how hard a sell this was at the pitch meeting. On one hand, it's pretty unorthodox, especially for a snack food or junk food, which generally have product sites which are the web equivalent of the back of a cereal box, at best.
On the other hand, how many times has a marketing VP said "get us on Facebook, get us on Wikipedia, get us on Twitter, get us on flickr, get us on YouTube!" and had the advertising team reply with a site containing nothing but a set of six buttons which do nothing but that? Pretty hilarious.
Home/Chatter: Twitter, Friends: Facebook, Videos: Youtube, Pics: Flickr, Products: Wikipedia
The only normal (traditional) thing about their site is the contact page. If they really wanted to go all out they would have only used myspace messages for contacting them.
It's amazing. Not only do they have a ground breaking site and a ton of viral traffic, they're not even paying for the hosting. They're getting Facebook, and Google, and Yahoo, and (cough) millions of altruistic donors to Wikipedia to foot the bill.
I'm sold. This isn't gimmicky, this is _brilliant_.
For a second there, I thought that was a twitter search page, and that skittles had put ads on it since the search term was skittles, and that twitter finally started making money of their service!!
What strikes me as odd is that it's all centralized at skittles.com . This sort of marketing obsoletes the need for a TLD that you try and entice your customers to visit, instead it allows you to engage with your customer where they are. Yeah, this made for a good publicity stunt, but it's nothing that plenty of other companies aren't doing far more subtley. Do you really want the player to know they're being played? ;)
"You can write the word Twitter 20 times in an actual Twitter post, but you can only write Skittles 17 1/2 times. We don't want to call it a conspiracy, but..."
Would it help if Skittles offered watermelon flavor?
Edit: OK, so I'm going to explain the humor and the criticism here, since I'm being voted down and I actually wanted to get a point across with this comment. thomasswift's comment of "and apparently racists love skittles" rubbed me the wrong way, in that it seems to implicate Skittles in the racism by association (or even just accepts the premise that by allowing people to say anything about Skittles on their home page they were tacitly endorsing everything people say about Skittles). I thought my comment was over the top enough to be obvious. But, I'm pretty sure every satirical comment I've made in the past couple of months here has been voted down. Hackers love satire. I dunno who you humorless ninnies are, but you aint who I wanna hang out with. I'm guessing you're new around here.
I originally wrote my comment in regards to the fact that about 8 tweets you can see on the page that were not obscured but the red boxes were extremely racist, hence what I said.
I did not mean to imply if you a non-racist person that likes skittles then you are a racist, or skittle endorses racism or anything like that.
Also other people seem to notice people taking advantage of this.
>> Naturally, people are already spamming the hell out of this. One tweet being repeated over and over again unfortunately uses a racial slur. As such, I suspect this little experiment will end rather soon for Skittles.
This is from a venturebeat article - http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/01/skittles-tweet-the-rainbow...
I don't usually like to comment when people downmod me, they probably had a reason, but I feel like I should try to explain this one.
I don't think your comment deserved downmods, either. It just seemed, to me, to be a simplistic view of the situation, and maybe the one that the old media would take (along the lines of Fox News approach to the Internet: a place for child predators and cyberterrorists). And, so, I made a joke that I thought pointed out the ridiculousness of that simple view; when you give your customers the ability to say anything they will say bad and good things. And that's OK. It doesn't mean anyone approves...just that people get to have their say.
My little moment of bitchery was about the humorless folks who've been voting down comic gold around these parts because it's biting. I've seen it enough lately, in my posts and others, that it feels like a pattern. And it's a pattern I don't like.
I don't think his comment endorsed that view at all. I saw it as a surprised reaction to see blatant racism on the front page of the website for a popular candy.
Also: you have to consider that people aren't voting you down because your humor is biting, but because it's not funny and doesn't add to the conversation.
P.S. Did anyone even notice they linked their product pages to Wikipedia? I'm thinking that sounded very hip and progressive at the planning meeting.