Last week the news media and the blogosphere were all abuzz about Skittles new “website”. The quotations are around “website” because it really isn’t a website, it’s a widget that sits on top of a series of non-Skittles sites - a siteless site. The widget points you to various social sites around the web, most notably Twitter, where you can see the communities comments about Skittles in real, unedited -time. Critics have declared this everything from “breakthrough” to “idiotic”. But all seem to agree that this won’t sell more Skittles.
What interested me through this whole affair was the headlines and abstracts that were popping up in Google News as I searched for “Skittles” last week. A large majority of the stories mentioned the name of the agency “Moderista!”. Modernista! was not however the agency that created this experience, it was Agency.com. Modernista! was mentioned because they used this same siteless approach to their very own website which launched a year earlier.
While most of the chatter focused on this brave move by Skittles, all of the subtext felt like the creative wind was knocked out of Agency.com’s sails in “adapting” this concept. Maybe the Agency.com folks felt that enough time had past or that the Modernista! audience was too industry-inside for anyone to care. In any case I wonder if Modernista’s phones might be ringing more than Agency.com’s this week.