So I feel bad and I think that maybe this little companies are just trying to make it and I should check them out….but then they remind me all over again why I have FB ads. Its not that I don’t like the idea that they’re easy enough anyone can do them. And hey Google annoys me with their “standards” and “regulations” because sometimes a text ad really does need two exclamation points!!

But just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. The FB advertiser that sent me into this particular rage is MyInteriorDecorator. Their ad was pretty basic and one of the few actually got be to click (unfortunately I can’t get it to show up again). This is a screen shot of the landing page (check out the link if you can’t see much off this picture).

Did you instantly recoil from the huge font? Or was it that the generic header and the bright red font clash How about the incredible amount of text but OMG they can help me RIGHT NOW! Apparently there is such a thing as a design emergency.

This company asks you to pay $15-$125 for a complete stranger to tell you how to design your house, but they cannot even match a blog header with a font color.

I’m really trying hard to be a nicer person and less critical of others work, but you’re a design company! Please spend just a little bit of money with a freelancer to design your blog/landing page or just take 10 minutes and find a better header, turn off the caps lock, change the font back to a normal size and change the red font color.

Dear Merchant Circle,

Please disable your the popup lady who tries to sell me on your package deals.

Thanks.

To experience the annoyingness for yourself – click here.

They utilize YouTube’s ability to have clickable portions within videos to create the buttons that take you to different “pages”. Very much like Modernista’s unwebsite (that Skittles later copied) and in keeping with their agency description “BooneOakley is a full-service, out of the box ad agency.”

Favicons are the most underrated design elements of any website. I love this execution and they made a pretty kick ass video about it FTW. 

Enjoy!

Initially, the Skittles homepage was pointed at the results page for a ”skittles” twitter search but within a couple of hours there were hundreds of inappropriate tweets making onto the results page. Hilarious for those of us with a juvenile sense of humor, but probably not what Skittles had intended. They have since redirected the homepage to their Wikipedia entry, but those twitter search results are still the redirect for the “chatter” section of the site. 

There was no clear consensus within my Twitter friends if it was genius or a lame attempt to jump on the bandwagon. I can’t understand why would they attempt to feed off of a social network without someone who was actively twittering as the face of the brand? Unless of course Skittles the Cat (@skittles) is the mastermind behind the candy. 

While I applaud the attempt to “go social” and I love the idea of the unwebsite, I really don’t think that it fits with the brand of the product. Once all the attention dies down from the new site, how is the unwebsite going to further the brand, continue to build awareness or make me want some Skittles? Just because the unwebsite is a great idea, doesn’t mean its a great idea for the brand. 

You can read some great posts on the Skittles redesign here, here and here. 

Now if I could have had a hand in this site redo, I would have taken a look around the internets to see what people were already saying about the brand. Check out what I learned about Skittles in 5 minutes. Starting with my first two Google searchs (auto completes say a lot!):

My Google searches taught me that you can infuse vodka with Skittles pretty easily and that Relient K (a band) has a hidden song on one of their CDs called “Skittles & Combos” which encouraged fans to bring Skittles and Combos to their shows back in the day. Also, in a Simpson’s episode Homer drinks a brew called Skittlebrau which enticed a lot of people to test out beers with Skittles in them. 

Next I took a peak at some skittles data on quantcast, quarkbase and compete. What did I learn? Prior to the relaunch of their site they had about 20,000 unique visitors a month, teens 12-17 were the most common demographic and visitors were likely to visit mtv.com, azlyrics.com and gamesradar.com. 

So basically Skittles took the the opportunity at a website redesign to do a half assed social media outreach (they don’t even have a twitter account!) and ignored two really great demographics they could have done some equally cool marketing to: adults experimenting with skittles in their alcohol and music loving, game playing, money spending teens. Hell, you have a band with a hidden track that about your product! But no Skittles you went the route of “Hey, I hear this Twitter Facebook thing is catching on, how can we jump on the bandwagon to look cool?”

As a media planner/buyer and resarch lover, the part that annoys me the most is that wih 42% of your visitors under the age of 18 (and an incredibly high index for 12-17 year olds) you’ve put an age restriction on your site! 

Skittles, six months down the road when you’ve completely lost any sort of online traffic and you noticed no increase in sales due to your website redo, please contact me for a real online marketing strategy.

Chiquita Bananas has a new website up called EatChiquita.com. Actually it could be an old site, but I just saw the facebook ad for bananas and this websitesite. 

Its almost fun, but takes forever to load anddoesn’t make me want to eat a banana, Chiquita or not. 

You can make a video mashup and see people take hits from a banana bong…nope totally not making it up. Videos are pretty half assed attempt to make the site interactive with video. Check out my video here (I could only select and item and write in an adjective and verb).

UPDATE: This is the previosuly mentioned facebook ad.