Taste The Monetisation

A screencap of what you'll see if you go to Skittles.com

They’re calling it “Interweb the rainbow”. Word is rapidly spreading through a series of tubes that the website of colourful fruit candy brand Skittles is not what it seems. Click on Skittles.com and you’ll encounter a Twitter search page for “skittles” – in other words, a complete list of every mention of the brand by the microblogging website’s millions of users worldwide.

Some commentators are calling this a brave and savvy marketing move. Ever since the Coke Zero Movement astroturfing embarrassment and the Chevy Tahoe disaster of odd-six, marketers are realising how hard it is to engage with the social or “conversational web” without being adbusted, spammed, pronounced ‘lame’ or – worst of all – ignored.

Not providing any branding whatsoever, any company-sanctioned way for web users to discuss the brand, is a much more radical move because it leaves the brand utterly at the mercy of the consumer. As Stan Schroeder commented at Mashable, “Skittles is basically saying: ‘We get it. Whatever we can do cannot be as awesome as what you guys and girls can do, so we’ll just link to it and let you do your thing.’”

However, for MG Siegler at venture capital site VentureBeat, “this use with Skittles just feels gimmicky. It would have been better as a part of the site, not as the homepage. My advice: I know times are tough, but hire a web designer.”

Predictably, there are already plenty of irrelevant but Skittles-namedropping tweets that are the equivalent of standing behind a news reporter with a sign that says “HI MUM!” And of course the company would certainly have anticipated negative coverage of the brand, and written it off as collateral damage in an overall extremely successful marketing campaign.

More worrying for the company are the inevitable offensive tweets – there have already been plenty of racist epithets – although Skittles appears to have anticipated this by making visitors to ‘its’ website confirm they are over 18, and warning that Skittles is not responsible for the content that might be posted at the site.

This is what troubles The Enthusiast. Is a door now open to an ethically vacuous style of marketing in which brands no longer have to adhere to industry codes of practice? It’s no biggie with an innocuous candy brand such as Skittles, but we’d argue that there is a difference between a brand saying, “Anyone could see this; it’s public, we’re not responsible for it,” and implicitly condoning any kind of malicious commentary by indirectly hosting the brand’s official website on an external site. What if an alcohol company pasted its logo over comments singing the praises of binge-drinking, underage drinking, drink-spiking and drink-driving?

At The Inquisitr, Steven Hodson sees it differently again. He cites Rex Hammock’s comment that the Skittles event might reveal how Twitter can make money in the future, but takes Hammock’s point a step further to suggest that Twitter might be doing this already. “Yup Twitter search is beginning its monetization [sic] plan – taking over other web sites with Twitter search pages for that site,” Hodson writes. “I wonder as well if Twitter is making any money from this or if it just a trial run?”

For quite some time, Twitter has been working on ways to “monetise” (or, in normal person language, “make money from”) its site. Social marketing pundits have generously come up with plenty of ideas, and an interview that co-founder Biz Stone gave to Marketing magazine in February frightened many into thinking Twitter was about to start charging its corporate users – a rumour Stone had to hose down in an official blog entry.

“In a sense, Twitter faces the Facebook problem in that it has created an ecosystem of Twitter-based businesses from which it does not profit, and marketers don’t need to pay to use the service,” writes Michael Learmonth in Advertising Age. The search function is particularly valuable to brands, because it reveals what Twitter users are saying about them at any given time.

However, Twitter might want to think carefully about whether the user backlash will be worth the money it can make by pimping out its search function. Last year, advertising agency Modernista tried a similar trick to Skittles, redirecting its website to various other places on the web in which it was mentioned. However, Wikipedia got pissed off and posted a large sign at the top of its entry on Modernista, which read:

“The website for this company obscures our logo with their own, and may lead the viewer to believe that Wikipedia serves as their homepage provider. This is not correct. Wikipedia has no affiliation with Modernista and has requested that Modernista cease this use of our website. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia written from a neutral point of view and does not endorse nor condemn Modernista, but is opposed to being used as a promotional mechanism in this manner for any third party.”

It’s entirely possible that the Twitter community might begin to feel the same way.

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