Of Skittles And Men

A lot of talk today about the new Skittles.com (spoiler alert: it’s a continuous twitter search for “Skittles”). Some say that it’s the future of advertising for CPG companies, as mentioned in Brian Morrissey’s post. Others don’t care.

This is a cool idea that will generate quite a lot of buzz. It perfectly represents what modern online marketing has become: trend surfing, launching the next neat tech thing that the industry talks about. The twitterati (and scary marketing types) will post and repost it. And that will generate better results than the conventional loop of creating a dull site that no one cares about, where you desperately try to drive traffic to justify the extravagant development costs.

The big question I have is whether Twitter got paid for this and whether this makes it a media company, at last. Personally I gotta say that I do appreciate the self-depricating tone with “interweb” and “gobbledygook”. For a CPG company that’s reaching out to the masses, right there.