• by Sarah Mahoney , Yesterday

Skittles -- making no apologies to Mozart, James Galway or Jethro Tull -- is heading to Twitch, turning a concert flute into the world's weirdest game controller. The Mars-owned brand is pairing the Skittles Gaming Flute with PointCrow, a Twitch influencer best known for adding ridiculously impossible challenges to popular games on the live-streaming platform.

Skittles worked with Omnicom to create the instrument, turning the concert hall-grade flute into a gaming controller. PointCrow, a popular gamer on the site who humbly describes himself as "aggressively mediocre at all the games I play," will spend 72 hours in a dedicated streaming room. The viewing community will help decide what challenges he should attempt, using only the Skittles Gaming Flute to play.

"Even when we do something other brands are doing, we try to find a very distinct Skittles way to activate it," says Ashley Gill, vice president of brand and content marketing for Mars Snacking North America. "We know gaming is something our audience, which is largely Gen Z, is passionate about and very engaged with. We thought this was an unmistakably Skittles thing to do."

The brand chose a flute, rather than, let's say, an oboe or a cello, because "flutes are smaller, and the way the keys are laid out lends a kind of synergy that would be at least a little familiar to gamers," she tells Marketing Daily. (It also helped that a few of the creative partners on the activation are flutists themselves.)

Besides, flutes are hard to play. And while PointCrow is adept at some other instruments, he's a flute newbie. He'll have to master some breath control and musicianship to trigger gameplay. The company expects the event to be "an intentionally chaotic, culturally tuned gaming experience."

Gill says the activation also touches on two different marketing shifts happening right now. First, there's building evidence that millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are growing increasingly annoyed by brands finding new ways to sneak into their digital lives. Simply showing up isn't enough.

"We know authenticity is so critical," Gill says. "On any platform, we have to show up in a way that's true to the brand, and it has to add value. It can't just be a brand message or otherwise disrupting a genuine experience."

In this case, she expects the community will welcome the campaign, precisely because it taps into the challenge trend. "They can participate in the chat and actually help shape the challenges he tries to solve."

Second, it fits into the "lots of littles" marketing phenomenon, and the growing sense that among fragmented audiences, umbrella campaigns matter less and less.

It's entirely likely, for example, that many of the Twitch streamers joining in the flute fun will never meet a Skittles message in any other channel (at least, not if they can help it.) The throughline, she says, is understanding the heart of the brand.

In the case of Skittles and many Mars brands, she says, nostalgia is a big consideration. "People grew up with these brands," she says. "So we work hard to make sure the 'what' of the brand is consistent. For Skittles, it's all about bringing a pleasantly perplexing escape from reality to everyday, mundane moments."

A teaser for the event is running on social media.