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 3 million rainbow-less packs are being sold nationwide to help raise money for  LGBT+ charities.

Our ‘Give the Rainbow’ campaign encouraged consumers to actively engage with the Skittles brand via the campaign hashtag ‘#onerainbow.’ This hashtag sat across all our communications and created a platform where we encouraged users to share the campaign story. Furthermore, we specifically used the Pride in London parade to showcase our message of support. The parade was a key channel for us to interact face to face with our core millennial consumer base.

We needed to find a contextually and brand relevant way to reach a broad millennial audience that we struggle to reach with TV. In order to make an impression, we targeted an occasion that really resonates with this audience  – Pride in London.

But whilst every other company adds a rainbow to their brand to show support, our rainbow comes as standard.

So instead, we took the unprecedented move to give up our rainbow, to show that Pride’s was the only one that truly mattered.

To prove our commitment to the cause, we made sure our new branding went all the way to the packaging and even the sweets themselves.

We used the rest of our limited spend tactically, to achieve maximum scale.

Building anticipation through open letters, sending samples to influencers and then making the biggest possible splash in front of the cameras on the parade route.

Skittles are traditionally TV-led, but as our core target becomes harder to reach through this channel alone, we needed to find new ways to make an impression. Our objective was to find a relevant new occasion for Skittles that would resonate with a broad millennial audience. Our activity focused around Pride in London to help support the LGBT+ community at a time when it mattered most. Our production budget was £71k, with a paid media budget of £35k.