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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyways, I'm not assured that McCain spent more - consider the advertising dollars required to build the Skittles brand over its lifetime...
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.
Yeah I'd be more interested in evidence actually.
With that said, I'd like to see evidence too.
Twitter has to spend a little more on bandwidth, but they're getting some more mainstream exposure, and likely a lot of new curious users.
Why would this be a waste of money? as marketing campaigns go, this doesn't look expensive.