Skittles: Social Web and the Navigation Takeover

A coworker of mine pointed me to a new campaign site for Skittles. It's a homepage takeover where their home page is replaced by a Twitter search and a navigator that takes you to the Skittles Facebook page and the Skittles YouTube page.

My own quick summary of what I've seen out on the web in comments are:

• Marketers that are asking questions to see if their readers have any opinions
• Social media people who are mostly saying that Skittles "gets it" by going social
• Advertising pundits that are saying how Skittles is ripping off the agency Modernista

From a usability point of view, I'd have to say I hate it. The usefulness of this explorer far degrades the sites that they're pointing to. I get a distracted from my goal of finding out more about skittles because my UI is blocked by their own navigator.

For brand and ad perspective. I think this campaign hits at the perfect time. Twitter usage is quite high and to do a splashy homepage takeover is drawing hundreds of thousands of eye-balls. As the first major brand to do this, they're probably the only ones now since the newness will have worn off. Executionally, it's so so. The creative aspects around this site and the navigator are not very exciting and future agencies will have to wrap this content around better creative to interest and engage their users.

The most interesting thing that I saw is that external groups are already piggy-backing off of this twitter effort to promote their own groups. I saw a tweet about saving Tibet that had the word Skittles to bring it into the tweet search results page. Also another by Jessica Stanell that promoted her own blog.

One of the big risks of opening up your brand to the web is the lack of reputation systems. If I was Wrigley's, I could have a bunch of anonymous users log on and start trashing Skittles on twitter and that would flood the site temporarily. It probably would only need to go on for about 5 minutes in order to get picked up by blogs or the press and bring the lawyers of the Mars Candy corporation to lock the site down. A reputation system could help (not bulletproof) the PR of Skittles against baseless attacks.

Although at the end of the day, being social on the web means you've got to have thick skin and given enough time, everyone will have it and the eyes to ignore all the crazies.