The “home page” changes frequently on some sort of schedule between Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia.

I think this was always the plan. Nobody said word one about it until the first time Twitter showed up on the home page in rotation.

I agree, sales are the ultimate metric. But you know as well as I do that selling sugar is a very competitive territory, and if you don’t have a brand, you are just a bag of sugar.

Their brand is all about the rainbow, and I think it works here.

If you look at Compete data (http://bit.ly/skittish) – directionally, not as absolute – the brand site gets practically no traffic: a paltry 20,000 uniques/month. The brand probably pays $1 for site support and maintenance for every unique visitor. Blimey.

We’ve seen the creative agency go gimmick-of-the-month. We need someone from Nielsen to spill the beans: have Skittles sales increased?

At the end of the day, Skittles in a goddam candy. That’s it – nothing more. It’s a one-buck sugar high. I can’t see any fuzzy “brand value” in driving traffic and conversations if retail sales don’t spike as a result. If awareness and consideration of Skittles candy increases but sales don’t, the campaign will have been pointless.

Read about the skittles online action, mistakenly entered in my birthdate incorrectly, and not able to access the site. At all.

Find it quite amusing really

But it certainly does nothing for the brand, in fact for me it generates negative brand equity. I know its a voice of one, but my experience is most certainly negative.

Social media is evolving… like it or not… and we can’t continue to be critical of the ad guys for not participating if we are uninformed and critical when they do. When I worked on Digital Snippets with Social Media Group and Ford … 99% of the commentary coming out of the social media fishbowl was completely missing the point. Very few bothered to understand our objectives… they just got critical based on their own fictions and self proclaimed “ownership” of the space. What they didn’t realize was that we exceeded our objectives on that program.

It’s hard not to take it personally when your peers turn on you like that. Even when we explained it, the hard lines had been drawn, so the conversation never evolved into a productive dialogue. Just advice on meeting objectives defined by third parties who never understood the challenge in the first place.

But in the end… the client was happy and even expanded the program because it was working on our objectives. Isn’t that the goal for any business?

Is skittles a long term thing? I dunno? Do you?
Is skittles going to wait out this noise from us before they launch their next round? I dunno? Do you?

Everybody is entitled to their opinions. But most of them are not worth a grain of sand unless they are informed.

Long answer: very maybe!

I wonder if not making a statement is one hell of a statement itself.