Everyone knows what a bore some corporate websites can be. Even when the try to make them somewhat interesting, they generally fail at the concept and revert to a basic run of the mill layout. Well skittles has gone a new route—throwing convention out the door on its ass, if you will. With the web evolving into a catalyst for social media, skittles.com has taken full advantage of this and hence their website is social media.
Their homepage is the feed from a search of skittles on twitter. Their videos section is the skittles page on YouTube. Their pictures section is the skittles page on Flickr. Their product descriptions are pages from Wikipedia. And their friend’s page is a skittles’ fan page from Facebook.
A New Marketing
I know for a fact that skittles isn’t the first website to do this (I heard about another company, I think a digital ad company, who did the same last summer [edit: found it Modernista!]), but they’ve done a pretty impressive job. The idea, it would seem, is the centre for a new type of marketing (social interactive marketing?). What it definitively is, though, is a bizarrely low effort approach to creating buzz.
What This Means
I think the uniqueness of the idea speaks for itself. But perhaps the content of the idea isn’t quite there. Just looking at some of the twitter posts appearing in the twitter search stream aggregate it’s easy to see why this site requires an 18+ age in order to even view the homepage (not to mention the zero responsibility statement). Also the overlay box which they are using as a navigation, even when minimized, occupies too much page space.
Regardless of any of the above, the twitter search feed is, at the time of writing, getting at least 20 new tweets about Skittles (Twittles?) every 30 or less seconds. So something is functioning with this website, good or bad.
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