hats off to Skittles

I am dazzled (If Skittled were an adjective, I'd use it) by the new Skittles site, yesterday and today. Yesterday it was skittles.com - the Twitter page; today it's skittles.com - the Facebook page. The change has been credited to spam/vulgarity (one and the same in my marketing book), and I think this says more about us as humans than it does about the brand.

I think people will take advantage of any chance to publicize themselves; "oh what? Skittles.com is publishing anything related to skittles in real time? Oh shit, I better type something so I get my 5 seconds of fame." - seriously? Oh yeah, it's America, the country of democracy and 15 minutes of fame. What happens when we place control in the hands of media hungry, socially-active consumers? Not decency in this time of good, but foul language and foul play. Gross.

I commend Skittles for going out on a limb, where most clients are scared to not have a TV ad, Skittles said we're doing social media all the way. They took a risk, and we've made them pay. As a young advertiser and social media advocate, I'm not happy with my fellow Twitterers. We abused the medium and teased a brand for having some balls.

Like this post says:

No one knows all the rules apart from the fact that the rules change every time you want to play. Trying to play it safe is the riskiest play of all right now.

So here's to Skittles, my hat's off to you for taking a risk; you've been the bravest, aside from Modernista (but they're an agency so they don't count), in terms of thinking outside the box when it comes to marketing yourself and interacting with your customers. High five!

Not to mention, that Farmers came to our agency the other day and left bags of Skittles on all of the tables, little did they know that just days later, I would be eating them still (they were huge bags) and happy to be part of a very brand-worthy social conversation. pretty cool.