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.

The redesign and rebranding of Skittles was the focal point of our Give the Rainbow campaign. We announced our gesture with an open letter to Pride in London, 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 high impact digital poster sites along the Pride route. We followed this through the line by rebranding our packaging and even removing the colour from the sweets themselves. And, of course, we were there on the day with a rainbow-less float partying along the parade route with Pride in London.

We made sure wherever the Skittles rainbow-less logo was used, it was accompanied with the ‘Give the rainbow. Taste the rainbow’ message.

Our ambition was to build awareness beyond TV by creating fame for the Skittles brand around Pride in London 2016. Our target was to reach 14.5m impressions with only £35k paid media spend by driving maximum organic reach.

·       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 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 talked about in over 80 countries

·       Skittles won best newcomer award at the Pride in London parade

·       The success of the campaign in 2016 has resulted in an exclusive partnership with Tesco in 2017 where 3million rainbow-less packs are being sold nationwide to help raise money for  LGBT+ charities.