GIVE THE RAINBOW

TitleGIVE THE RAINBOW
BrandMARS
Product/ServiceSKITTLES
Entrant ADAM&EVEDDB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation ADAM&EVEDDB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Placement MEDIACOM London, UNITED KINGDOM
Additional Company CAIN & ABEL London, UNITED KINGDOM
Additional Company 2 KING HENRY London, UNITED KINGDOM
Credits
Name Company Position
Ben Priest adam&eveDDB Chief Creative Officer
Ben Tollett adam&eveDDB Executive Creative Director
Richard Brim adam&eveDDB Executive Creative Director
Matt Fitch adam&eveDDB Creative
Mark Lewis adam&eveDDB Creative
Maebh Kelly adam&eveDDB Integrated Producer
Emilie Verlander adam&eveDDB Experiential Producer
Caroline Tripp adam&eveDDB Project Manager
Fiona McArthur adam&eveDDB Managing Partner
Brittany Lippett adam&eveDDB Account Director
Matt Dankis adam&eveDDB Account Manager
Jessica Lovell adam&eveDDB Joint Head of Planning
David Mortimer adam&eveDDB Senior Planner
Lindsey Jordan, Eloise Huntingford Mediacom Media Planners

The Campaign

When people think of Skittles, they think of the rainbow. It’s in the "Taste the rainbow" slogan, it’s on the packaging, it’s even seen in the colours of the sweets themselves. It’s our most powerful and distinctive brand asset, but there’s a time of year when another rainbow is more important than ours – Pride’s. Rather than protect our most precious brand asset, we wanted to show Pride’s rainbow was the only one that truly mattered. We got undressed, dropped our colours and gave up our rainbow so Pride’s would take centre stage. Give the rainbow. Taste the rainbow.

Creative Execution

The redesign and rebranding of Skittles was the focal point of our campaign. It was important for all elements to remain as is (font, placement etc) and simply just replace the distinctive Skittles rainbow branding with black and white keylines across the logo and pack design. We announced our gesture with an open letter to Pride, which appeared in press and as an animated video online. We stripped the rainbow from our website and social channels and our rainbow disappeared from key DOOH sites along the Pride route. We followed this through the line by rebranding our packaging and removing the colour from the sweets themselves. And, of course, we were there on the day with a rainbowless float partying along the route with Pride in London.

Ambition:build mental availability beyond TV by creating fame for the Skittles brand around Pride in London 2016. We wanted to do this as efficiently as possible, by driving maximum organic reach with as little investment as possible. Target: reach 14.5m impressions with only £35k paid media spend. • Total impressions across all touch points: 31,192,302 • 56% of total impressions were organic: 17,436,600 • Media cost per impression: £0.001 • These figures do not include additional impressions from organic Facebook shares or articles in major publications such as The Mirror, LAD Bible, GQ, Adweek and Pride itself • Despite all media being targeted at the UK, the campaign was seen and talked above in over 80 countries and 339 cities • Skittles won best newcomer award at the Pride in London parade • General sentiment across the campaign with both the LGBT community and wider millennial audience was extremely positive.

Whilst rebranding Skittles sat at the heart of our campaign, having a presence at the Pride in London parade was crucial to the credibility and exposure of our campaign message. We literally needed to walk the walk to showcase our gesture of support.

Skittles are traditionally TV-led but given our core target are becoming harder to reach through this channel alone we needed to find new ways to make an impression. Our objective was to find a relevant new occasion for Skittles that would resonate with our millennial audience. We weren’t just targeting an LGBT audience, but finding a contextually and brand relevant way to reach a broader mainstream millennial audience that we struggle to reach with TV.