Skittles, and the Twitter Gamble
Posted in Youth Culture Research on March 2nd, 2009
Try as I might, the 600-pound gorilla in the room is simply too big to ignore: Twitter, my friends, must be addressed.
Now, it’s not that I don’t love Twitter. I assure you I do — I genuinely do. Between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm most days you can find me firing off “@” signs with astonishing ferocity. I “re-tweet” and “DM” with the best of them. I go to bed and dream in 140 character sentences. And I’ve been on Twitter long enough, like many of you I’m sure, to amass a sizable following of wise and well-meaning people that I’ve have never and will never meet. So I really do understand and appreciate Twitter. I swear.
But I’ve been putting off this post about Twitter for months. I simply didn’t want to be part of that whirling tornado of hype that has been steadily amassing behind it. Every day another venerable news source is sucked into its gravitational field — forced to produce a now-familiar “why Twitter changes everything” article. But this week, events made it clear that I could no longer pretend to ignore the Twitter phenomenon. First, one of my very favorite websites, Millenial Marketing featured an excellent, thought-provoking post about Twitter. Then there was the Skittles thing. So here we go: Twitter will have its day.
First, let’s get to the news. As you likely heard, Skittles performed a clever (and daring) marketing stunt by redirecting their website to a real-time Twitter feed for the search term “Skittles.” What does that mean in non-nerd speak? When you arrive on Skittles’ homepage (which, as of this writing, is still live) you don’t see a boring corporate web page, but a live stream of all Twitter comments that include the word “Skittles.” Whether people know it or not, every Twitter user throughout the Twitterverse who uses the word “Skittles” will have their comments, at least for a second or two, front-and-center on the corporate site. This is, to be sure, pretty brilliant. It’s fun, vaguely mischievous and viral in the best way — you can’t help but want to fire up twitter.com and type “skittles” just once. It also costs about the equivalent of a King-sized bag of Skittles to implement, and it has created an enormous amount of buzz. I mean, just check out all the free publicity their getting from us!
All in all, this was a great coup for Skittles. A cool media moment that made just about everyone who heard about it smile.
But a few people (us included) have asked a worthwhile question: were any of their actual target customers in on the game? See, the other piece of Twitter intell that I came across this week was about Twitter demographics. For those of you who like the 30,000-foot summary, I can save you the reading: there is essentially no one under 18 on Twitter. Practically no one. The 18-34 age range makes up the largest percentage of Twitter users, but heavy anecdotal evidence suggests that the 34 year-olds far, far outweigh the 18 year-olds. For the time being, Twitter is simply not a tool for reaching Gen Y. Gen Y maybe logged on around the clock, but they’re not spending their time on Twitter. They’ve got IMs to send, thankyouverymuch.
Which makes you wonder: the Skittles promotion may have been great for publicity, but did they reach the audience they want? Or are they aiming (like Cheetos) to pick up an older audience to augment their core consumers? What do you think?
