Skins on MySpace
E4’s new youth show Skins had a great audience for its first episode - 1.6m, much of which must have been driven by an excellent youth marketing campaign by Naked and Holler. The show’s had a dual-position with sites at e4.com/skins and MySpace. The E4 site’s allowed visitors to re-design the logo, one of which they re-brand the site with every week, enter compeititons and see mini web-only episodes that site alongside the broadcast show.
As well as showing the episodes, the MySpace site acts as a mini-hub pushing vistors to the profile pages of all the characters. Vistors can then friend either individual characters or the show as a whole. It’s interesting to see the interaction from real people in the comments on the characters pages. There’s a mix of remarks to the actors and to the persona’s of the characters.
With the characters profiles appearing alongside visitors’ real-world friends it shows how with the right product you can integrate branded activity into consumer’s own social networks.
What’s a shame is that the producers haven’t really seen the activity through post-launch. The profiles have been beautifully designed and really reflect the characters’ personalities, they include good ‘about me’ info and they even include video and audio like a real MySpace user. What they haven’t done though, is update the characters blogs. It would be great to hear each character’s own take on the episodes that have just aired and the comments from visitors would have been a great read too. It could of also gone a step further with characters interacting on each other’s MySpace pages.
The Skins campaign is easily the best execution so far of a big brand trying to replicate MySpace users activity, but it will be great to see who goes the whole hog.