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
Our activity was centered around the days leading up to Pride in London and on the parade itself. The day prior to the Pride in London parade, 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. Importantly, we were there at Pride in London with a rainbowless float to showcase our gesture.
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.
Insights, Strategy and the Idea
We used Pride as a contextually relevant way for us to tap into a wider millennial audience that we struggle to reach with TV. We gave up our rainbow during Pride so that all the attention was on theirs. We specifically chose London centric contextually relevant media to dramatise the campaign.