Candy company Skittles has come up with a very interesting campaign, a follow on from their long running "Touch the Rainbow", which has been released a day ago in what looks like an orchestrated attempt to create a viral whirlwind of publicity.

One gets a sense of careful media planning with this campaign, and a well considered approach to creating something that the "viral community" will got nuts over. It features a cute cat - a standard component of all internet memes.

The campaign has 5 ads, which are all very different but centred around the one premise of interactivity - they want you to touch the screen. This also leads one to think that that primary method of engagement is the personal computer - you generally do not sit close enough to a television set to "touch the screen" but you certainly do when using the computer.

Is this a move toward the internet market as a primary focus rather than the traditional media?

It is interesting to see how one idea is grabbed onto, whilst others are passed over.
It appears that this is a five ad campaign, but buzz on the internet is centered solely around this ad, rather than the whole campaign. This has both positives and negatives for a brand.

The other two ads in the campaign have only garnished 10% of the traffic that the Skittles Cat ad has, showing that even within a campaign some aspects will out perform others, but the consistency still needs to be there.

Even if the creative focus has been directed t creating a viral campaign, the support for that total campaign still needs to be maintained rather than redirected into the one aspect going viral.

This can be seen to be reactionary rather than considered. At the end of the day, a campaign that absorbs the buzz of an aspect going viral, embraces it and carries on as if this was what was expected to happen, is the campaign that has got the legs to continue.
A great example of this is the Old Spice "Smell like a Man" Campaign, well the first time round anyway.

So does the other ad's in the series have the same connectivity to the primary one?
Not so much.

Some of the ads are a little on the strange side, and you have to wonder about the intention behind them, like this one.

Disturbed? Yes.
Consistency of message across the whole campaign, not so much. It feels like they have created a total campaign that is loosely connected and chucked in one that has been carefully planned to be "the viral one".

It is interesting to see the continuation of an idea in a campaign over many years though. Here is another "touch the rainbow" ad from a couple of years back.