Skittles.com: Interweb the rainbow

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>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.

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

<a href="http://www.modernista.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.modernista.com/</a> (an ad agency) has been doing something similar for a while. Seems a bit copycat.

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.<p>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.

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

They 2.0'd their site:<p>Home/Chatter: <i>Twitter</i>, Friends: <i>Facebook</i>, Videos: <i>Youtube</i>, Pics: <i>Flickr</i>, Products: <i>Wikipedia</i><p>The only normal (traditional) thing about their site is the contact page. If they <i>really</i> wanted to go all out they would have only used myspace messages for contacting them.

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 <i>skittles</i>, and that twitter finally started making money of their service!!

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? ;)

I thought it was hacked, but this is legit.

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

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

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