Marketing Pilgrim

Advertising Age has an interesting position in the business world these days. The publication is sometimes representative of the old guard. I remember at PubCon in Las Vegas where that point was made in a video that Rance Crain, AdAge’s editor-in-chief, was shown saying that Blendtec simply needed to take out print ads to accomplish what was done with its “Will It Blend” campaign. Ouch. He didn’t appear to be on top the one of more impressive stories of the social media marketing age.

Say what you want about the Skittles experiment with social media, the campaign was effective in increasing the rainbow candy’s web site presence.

Hitwise reports a 1332% increase in web visitors on March 3rd.

Alexa–put the rotten tomatoes away–confirms this jump in traffic:

And Google Trends saw a spike in the number of people searching for “skittles.”

The question was asked here yesterday by Joe Hall and there were as many opinions as there are colors in a bag of Skittles but as of this morning the jury is in. Skittles has taken down its site redesign reports MediaPost.

Apparently putting the brand and its message in a vehicle driven by consumers brings out the good the bad and the ugly.

The good was the fact that yesterday a lot of people were talking about Skittles. I have to admit that unless I am forced to I am not thinking about Skittles or writing a post about them. So to that degree this experiment certainly worked. Buzz was created and people were talking about the crazy colors of the Skittles rainbow.

Yesterday rainbow-colored candy brand, Skittles launched a new web presence that has caused notice by many in the world of marketing and average web-head-geeks a like. The Mars-owned company gave their site a facelift of sorts that has left some in awe and others in shock.

Now when visitors go to skittles.com they don’t see the typical corporate branded site. Instead they get a fresh serving of social media. The home page is essentially an overlay of search.twitter.com displaying results for the term “skittles.” There are several other navigational features that Skittles has added to point users to other social media outlets such as YouTube and Facebook.

The Internet content economy is like the candy rack when you were a kid. You know what I mean. You covet that bag of Skittles but you’re caught a little short on funds that day. So to feed your candy habit you sneak a bag out of the store. You know you broke the law but it seemed so innocent and what the heck, every kid deserves a bag of Skittles now and then right?

It’s Monday (okay, well, Tuesday by the time you’re reading this), there’s a lot of news out there. To keep you on top of it all, we’re rounding up all those loose bits and putting them here.

• Have you heard of this little thing called “Twitter”? Yeah, this link isn’t about that. But if you were on Twitter today, you couldn’t have missed the chatter about Skittles’s latest move—turning its site into a gateway to its content on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia and . . . okay, Twitter. I lied.