• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Skittles is no stranger to strange ads: Weird absurdities have been its MO for decades. With a new campaign for Skittles Gummies, it's taking the absurd in a new direction, emphasizing the product's softness in truly unnerving ways. Two teen boys enjoy the candy inside the soft pouch of a crooning kangaroo man. An ultra-relaxed guy gets a massage from two jellyfish, cheerfully feeding him Skittles while he's on the table. A woman appreciates the texture as her balloon dog scoots its butt across her carpet.

Icky? Absolutely. And also very much on purpose.

The ads, built for Gen Z, are running across linear, CTV, OLV and social in a campaign Mars says "turns softness into a distinctly Skittles universe: unexpected, immersive and pleasantly perplexing."

What's different now is that — thanks to volatile cocoa prices and shifting demographics — fruity and increasingly gummy candies are taking over the confection business, and Skittles is making sure it owns the territory it helped create.

The National Confectioners Association says Americans spent a record $55 billion on sweet treats in 2025, with industry forecasts calling for $62.2 billion by 2030. Chocolate still dominated, representing 51.7% of confectionery sales, but non-chocolate candy has been steadily gaining ground, growing from roughly one-third of market share in 2015 to 40.9% in 2025.

Older consumers tend to prefer chocolate, while Gen Z and millennials skew heavily toward chewy, gummy and freeze-dried categories.

Skittles has long been the dominant crunchy fruit candy, but the gummy territory it entered in 2020 is crowded. Hard candy favorites like Lifesavers, Jolly Ranchers and SweetTARTS all have gummy versions. Ferrara Candy Co. is a powerhouse, with Nerds Gummy Clusters and Trolli. And nobody's counting out Haribo and its venerable Gummy Bears.

Which may explain why, when Skittles decided to make some noise for its gummies line, it went as strange as it possibly could. Kangaroo pouches and jellyfish massages aren't just weird for weird's sake — they're a staking of claim in a category that's getting more competitive by the year.