Social Media: A Taste of Success

According to Zaid Al-Zaidy, chief strategy officer at TBWALondon, the agency behind the October 2010 Skittles social media campaign, the conversation started like this: “We don’t have enough money to do more than a repeat airing of last year’s TV campaign on lower ratings.” The conversation then became: “Well why don’t we take all the money we do have and invest it in Facebook?” “Why Facebook?” “Well it’s the mobile living room of 9 million of our core audience, and if the ‘rainbow’ could live anywhere, it should live on Facebook.”

The agency then set about creating a social media programme that would help Skittles to deepen relationships with its loyal followers. It launched a content-driven campaign, making sure everything it
did was funny, and it kept things simple and portable.

The main thrust was to release the colourful, wonderfully odd thing they call ‘The Rainbow’ through Facebook and all over the web. This was the new positioning for the Skittles brand, which was “wonderfully
colourful, always fun and slightly odd”. The agency then delivered a constant stream of content that was engaging and relevant to its target audience. This ranged from challenging followers to drown stunt martial artist David Phoenix, while watching live on Facebook, to the Skittles Super Mega Updater where, in their very own dedicated call centre, Skittles call handlers turned 20,000 fans’ updates into real-time video messages.

“Our three big spikes of content included ‘Welcome to the Rainbow’ to warm up our fans, ‘Dazzle the Rainbow’ to get our fans to do something and to connect the real and virtual worlds and ‘Update the Rainbow’ to Rainbow-fy people’s updates,” says Al-Zaidy.

In between each ‘content spike’, the agency sustained interest and conversation with a minimum of one post per day, including funny polls and statements such as: “If you knew a Skittles-coloured frog was poisonous, would you still be tempted to lick it?’ This single post generated 1,431 ‘likes’ and 559 comments.
And the result? A huge user base of 27,000 people utilising it over the two-week campaign period. Compare that with 99 per cent of all Facebook apps, which have fewer than 100 daily users.

Indeed, since the TBWA Skittles campaign started in October, it has grown the fan base more than 50 per cent. The current total now stands at more than 1.98 million, outstripping the organic growth model by in excess of 500,000 and making Skittles the largest UK confectionery brand on Facebook. Double-digit sales growth shows that this is paying back more than TV ever did, with econometrics revealing that these new
fans are a very significant part of delivering incremental sales.

Al-Zaidy sums up: “You know you’ve created something special when an under-the-radar social campaign is opted into by so many of your target audience that you begin to challenge the might of a mass-media broadcast campaign.”

facebook.com/skittles.uk