Skittles has launched a kind of aggregator site for its brand.If you visit www.skittles.com, you're greeted with an ever-present hovering menu thing that leads to feeds from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr... all the usual web 2.0 favourites.
I don't get it. For several reasons.
The site sits behind an age verification check, because its content is uncontrollable. Surely most Skittles buyers are young? We'll let that one go though, because any interested ten year old will just lie on the check.
The menu isn't well executed and it gets in the way. It even obscures part of the 'Contact Us' page, which belongs to Skittles. That's just lazy.
The major problem with it seems to be that in a web full of aggregator sites, why would anybody be interested in this Skittles effort? Maybe there's an army of Skittles fans, incapable of using Flickr to satisfy their craving for Skittley pictures, who will form the user base.
There's one very good reason why people will be interested. In the best traditions of the web, the Skittles Twitter feed is now carrying messages like 'Skittles made me piss a rainbow. Is that normal?'. Sorry, but that was one of the cleaner ones. I don't think I want to know what Skittlefisting is.
The site is generating loads of chatter, but it's not exactly positive and I've got serious doubts about whether it will be allowed to stay up for long enough to look for any increase in sales.
Thankfully, the pictures and videos links point to corporate spaces on Flickr and Youtube, otherwise I think we can all imagine what could have been achieved with some creative image tagging.
If skittles.com does stay up, then as soon as the people abusing the Twitter feed get bored and move on, it's going to have no traffic at all.
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