Skittles Twitter Campaign Turns Into Potty-Mouthed Echo Chamber

Skittles’ attempt to engage with the youth of today via funky interweb networking interface Twitter has gone wrong in the most apt way possible – it’s turned into a playground flurry of curse words and abuse, with a corner for the nerds to hide in.

Skittles are a brand that was squarely aimed at children and potheads with its “Taste The Rainbow” campaign, with smiling tots amazed at the technicolour hailstorm of “S”-stamped corn syrup and gelatin somehow harmlessly raining down on their beatific faces. Well, that was just not noughties enough, and Skittles have gone viral over the last few days with a Skittles.com site that’s a rolling Twitter page, updated every time someone says “Skittles” on Twitter. Couple current unemployment rates with cheap home broadband and a thirst for internet fame that cannot be slaked, and you’ve got people mentioning Skittles a whole lot, just to be part of the viral wave.

Skittles imagined that suddenly teenagers across the world would stop shanking each other for a minute and start saying “OMG Skittles iz the BOMBB! Check out ths new flavas! CRAZY CORES!” all over each other’s new media platforms. Unfortunately they forgot that while Twitter gets monthly traffic over over 4 million unique users, less than a quarter of those are frequent users, most of them evangelical narcissists or politicians; it’s a service whose perceived value has accelerated ahead of its actual traction. No-one but poindexter Twitter addicts are going to care that their post is on the Skittles site, so it’s descended into hyper-aware pranksters writing posts like “On the skittles thing? Bollocks arse fuck soapy titwank cunt wankstain piss frenulum shit twat motherfucker toss Rick Astley…”, or with the word “Skittles” alongside the legend “ANAL CUNT THAT IS GOOD” – and then people picking up on that and reposting it until the Skittles.com feed reads “ANAL CUNT THAT IS GOOD” all the way down.

There’s also a small portion of commentators that are Twitter/new media nerds who are amazed by the whole thing, yet so conscious of its inherent new-media-ness that it’s not actually going to work as deeply pervasive advertising. “The Skittles stunt wasn’t about people reading their page; It was about people talking about Skittles”, says one poster. Look, the only people talking about Skittles are other brand agencies and media analysts who spout truly meaningless words like ”pageless, seemless [sic] brand touch points that are inherently embedded in the social web”. Unless Mars Confectionary are seeking to merely secure the valuable “blogger in need of sugar rush” market, it’s not yet going to triumph over bus shelter campaigns; it’s an interesting idea, but it’s going to take a lot more Twitter users before this is anything more than that.

P.S. Two of the new Skittles TV ads are lame, one trying too hard to be clever, the other to be virally wacky, but this one made me chuckle. It comes from the increasingly old-school type of thinking – deploying well written gags. Chocolate Skittles though? Gross:

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | March 3, 2009 2:14PM |