6 ms·

Skittles.com: Interweb the rainbow

53 points by mariorz 18y ago

unalone 18y ago
That's pretty damn incredible. They're taking a risk, but at the same time their home page is fascinating now.
alaskamiller 18y ago
The Internet now has three phases: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Skittles.
- unalone 18y ago
  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.
  - alaskamiller 18y ago
    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.
    - axod 18y ago
      I'm really not seeing why it's awesome. Would it have been awesome if they just redirected to a google search for 'skittles'?
  - jaaron 18y ago
    Which IRC channel?
    - zain 18y ago
      #startups on freenode.
- alaskamiller 18y ago
  Just an FYI: Agency.com is the team behind this: http://www.clickz.com/3632968 http://www.clickz.com/3632968 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.
- patio11 18y ago
  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. Two out of three ain't bad.
  - unalone 18y ago
    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.
- moe 18y ago
  Hm. I guess there must be something wrong with me because I'm so utterly not impressed. Why would I go to the skittles homepage in first place? Why would I more likely go there when they have a twittr stream of the #skittles tag? I don't get it. Why on earth do you guys get so excited over this?
  - unalone 18y ago
    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. That's a ballsy move.
    - moe 18y ago
      That's a ballsy move. 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.
      - dreish 18y ago
        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?
        18y ago
Raphael 18y ago
I thought it was hacked, but this is legit.
- unalone 18y ago
  From the source: "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..."
- thomasswift 18y ago
  and apparently racists love skittles
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    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.
    - thomasswift 18y ago
      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-or-racial-slurs/ 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.
reidab 18y ago
http://www.modernista.com/ http://www.modernista.com/ (an ad agency) has been doing something similar for a while. Seems a bit copycat.
mtrichardson 18y ago
Pretty disgusting spam popping up there (along with the rest of the stuff - pretty awesome).
patio11 18y ago
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.
- mariorz 18y ago
  They linked everything to outside sites. That's the point. Why would this be a waste of money? as marketing campaigns go, this doesn't look expensive.
- natrius 18y ago
  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.
  - axod 18y ago
    >> "No, this is definitely selling candy. People are talking about Skittles. That sells candy." Yeah I'd be more interested in evidence actually.
    - natrius 18y ago
      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. With that said, I'd like to see evidence too.
- bouncingsoul 18y ago
sachinag 18y ago
This is a process story co-opted by our Madison Avenue overlords. Oh, how I hate process stories.
dkokelley 18y ago
They 2.0'd their site: 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.
- seldo 18y ago
  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_.
jjames 18y ago
I for one welcome our new skwittle overlords. Skittles: the official candy of the twitterati?
ja2ke 18y ago
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.
prakash 18y ago
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!!
- wenbert 18y ago
  twitter == public feedback page
marksutherland 18y ago
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? ;)
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

53 points by mariorz 18y ago

unalone 18y ago

That's pretty damn incredible. They're taking a risk, but at the same time their home page is fascinating now.

alaskamiller 18y ago

The Internet now has three phases: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Skittles.

unalone 18y ago
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.
- alaskamiller 18y ago
  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.
  - axod 18y ago
    I'm really not seeing why it's awesome. Would it have been awesome if they just redirected to a google search for 'skittles'?
- jaaron 18y ago
  Which IRC channel?
  - zain 18y ago
    #startups on freenode.
alaskamiller 18y ago
Just an FYI: Agency.com is the team behind this: http://www.clickz.com/3632968 http://www.clickz.com/3632968 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.
patio11 18y ago
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. Two out of three ain't bad.
- unalone 18y ago
  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.
moe 18y ago
Hm. I guess there must be something wrong with me because I'm so utterly not impressed. Why would I go to the skittles homepage in first place? Why would I more likely go there when they have a twittr stream of the #skittles tag? I don't get it. Why on earth do you guys get so excited over this?
- unalone 18y ago
  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. That's a ballsy move.
  - moe 18y ago
    That's a ballsy move. 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.
    - dreish 18y ago
      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?
      - 18y ago

Raphael 18y ago

I thought it was hacked, but this is legit.

unalone 18y ago
From the source: "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..."
thomasswift 18y ago
and apparently racists love skittles
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  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.
  - thomasswift 18y ago
    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-or-racial-slurs/ 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.

reidab 18y ago

http://www.modernista.com/ http://www.modernista.com/ (an ad agency) has been doing something similar for a while. Seems a bit copycat.

mtrichardson 18y ago

Pretty disgusting spam popping up there (along with the rest of the stuff - pretty awesome).

patio11 18y ago

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.

mariorz 18y ago
They linked everything to outside sites. That's the point. Why would this be a waste of money? as marketing campaigns go, this doesn't look expensive.
natrius 18y ago
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.
- axod 18y ago
  >> "No, this is definitely selling candy. People are talking about Skittles. That sells candy." Yeah I'd be more interested in evidence actually.
  - natrius 18y ago
    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. With that said, I'd like to see evidence too.
bouncingsoul 18y ago

sachinag 18y ago

This is a process story co-opted by our Madison Avenue overlords. Oh, how I hate process stories.

dkokelley 18y ago

They 2.0'd their site: 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.

seldo 18y ago
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_.

jjames 18y ago

I for one welcome our new skwittle overlords. Skittles: the official candy of the twitterati?

ja2ke 18y ago

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.

prakash 18y ago

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!!

wenbert 18y ago
twitter == public feedback page

marksutherland 18y ago

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? ;)

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]