The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2021
Skittles recolours Pride's black-and-white history with the rainbow off its packs
Skittles removed the rainbow from its packs and gave the colours to Pride by recolouring the black-and-white images of the first marches.
Skittles
What it had to solve
Skittles wanted to drive renewed awareness, buzz and relevance for the brand in a way that delivered meaningful impact for the LGBTQ+ community. It found the opportunity in an absence: there was very little imagery from the very first Pride marches, and the few photographs that existed were in black and white.
How it works
Skittles wanted to drive renewed awareness, buzz and relevance for the brand in a way that delivered meaningful impact for the LGBTQ+ community. It found the opportunity in an absence: there was very little imagery from the very first Pride marches, and the few images that existed were in black and white.
Recolour the Rainbow did the opposite of most Pride tie-ins. The brand removed the rainbow from its packs, then gave the colours to the LGBTQ+ community by authentically recolouring imagery from Pride's history.
The campaign restored colour to moments the movement had only ever seen in monochrome, returning visibility and vibrancy to Pride's early history. The work is filed in the D&AD awards archive under Press & Outdoor.
Why it lands
- Removing the rainbow from the packs is a visible sacrifice that makes the later gift meaningful rather than decorative.
- Recolouring real archive photographs does concrete cultural work: it returns colour and visibility to history that only ever existed in black and white.
- Choosing the community's own first marches keeps the brand a donor of visibility rather than a borrower of symbolism.
What it did
The recoloured images returned visibility and vibrancy to the movement: moments from Pride's earliest marches regained the colour that had been missing from the historical record. The work is filed in the D&AD awards archive under Press & Outdoor.
What you can take
Giving away the brand's own symbol can be more powerful than borrowing the cause's: by going colourless, Skittles made the rainbow it handed back mean something real.
Since then
The work was created for Pride month 2021 as Skittles' LGBTQ+ campaign, and D&AD files it in the awards archive under Press & Outdoor. The archive records no reach or sales figures, so the case stands on the mechanism: a brand whose identity was a rainbow handed that rainbow to a community whose history had been recorded without it.
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