BUZZ NEWS

A No to UGC: Non-official Snickers Site Closed

Posted on March 16, 2009
C. Werle

A few weeks ago the candy brand Skittles, owned by Mars, had launched its new corporate website based nearly 100% on social media content. When you opened the website, during the first days you would be directed to a page showing all the twitts containing the word "Skittles." Now the homepage shows the Facebook Skittles fan page. If you click on media you can watch YouTube videos about Skittles or leaf through a Skittles Flickr album.

This bold move by the brand (after all Skittles has hardly any influence on the content of its own corporate website!) was welcomed by many marketers as a new era of brands’ social media adoption. But Skittles soon had to learn that the risk taken was quite big. After several negative comments about Skittles were posted on Twitter, less twitts appeared on the site. Apparently Skittles now moderates the twitts on its homepage.

It seems like Mars has panicked and looked around for other possibly "dangerous" non-corporate content concerning their brands on the web. What they found was a site called snckrz.com created by Poke on which web users could create their own Snickers logo. According to the agency the site had already attracted more than 80,000 visitors. Mars forced Poke to close down the website. This is what it looks like now:

Snckrz.com seemed like a natural complement of the official Snickers ad campaign Snickers Speak. Consumers are invited to learn “Snacklish,” a “new” language created by Snickers (including words such as 3 o’clockishment or Snackanomics), that is meant to convey the feeling you have when you eat a Snickers bar and to transport the brand’s message into everyday life. The two concepts are similar and Poke’s website does not seem to have had a negative influence on Snicker’s brand image so far.

Of course you could ask why an agency would create a website for a brand that is not its client, but the even bigger question is: Why does Snickers refuse a perfectly good ad that it’s given for free? Didn’t they want to be associated to Poke agency?

Whatever their reasons might have been, fact is that UGC (user generated content) is gaining popularity, and often marketing campaigns are quoted/modified/parodied/distorted... Brands have less and less control on how their brand name is used, especially on the web. Just think of the latest Blackberry/Apple ad (the original Blackberry ad, the pleasefixtheiphone UGC spoof and the official Apple response), or of the buzz the huge number of Cadbury ad spoofs (more than 1,000 parodies of the gorilla ad on YouTube alone) are still creating, even long after the campaigns are officially over. Cadbury was more than happy about this additional, free publicity. So why isn’t Snickers? Why not just grab an opportunity and use it in their favor? In view of how internet works nowadays it looks like this panic reaction was maybe not the wisest.