Playing off the success of last year’s Touch the Rainbow TV commercial, we created original online content for the Canadian market that let them actually touch the Rainbow. "Touch the Rainbow on YouTube" consisted of several online videos that asked people to physically touch their computer screens and watch as their finger plays a starring role in a Skittles commercial. The videos were shot in a way that acknowledges that the finger is there and makes it appear as though the user’s finger has effected the action – even though it (of course) hasn’t. It’s a playful bridge of interaction between "the real world" and the digital space. And, it’s also a new way of approaching how we interact with in an interactive medium.

The videos were posted to a specially designed YouTube channel.Instead of buying traditional media, we used a seeding strategy. The videos were seeded in two ways:1. We accessed the Skittles Facebook fan page which has nearly 900,000 Canadian fans and sent them all an exclusive preview of the ads, then linked them to our YouTube channel.

2. We seeded the videos to influential bloggers as well as consumers.

3. We also engaged a popular Canadian YouTube vlogger to create a spoof video for his fans and link it back to our page – leveraging his 230,000+ YouTube subscribers.

To add to our views, we also purchased the masthead on the YouTube home page twice throughout the campaign.

Based on the timing of this written submission, results are not complete.However, within 2 days of being released the videos had almost 2 million views. They were being tweeted about and shared every few seconds. They were picked up by over 800 blogs and the campaign is also being picked up by the United States. Please refer to our entry video for complete results.