Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [36]
You type: “Dance.” The chicken, by God, it starts to dance. Nothing terribly fancy or graceful. Not the moonwalk, or even the chicken dance. More like a drunk forty-seven-year-old at a wedding. In a chicken suit.
You type: “Lay an egg.” And there it goes, squatting, miming the laying of an egg. Even if you hate mimes, you decide that this is different: chickens miming on command on your computer should be given a pass.
Next you type: “Choke your chicken.” And it cleverly avoids any perverted connotation of the euphemism and grabs itself by the throat.
Then you type: “Masturbate.” And the chicken walks the high road directly toward you, leans into the camera, and waves a chicken finger. Shame on you.
Welcome to Burger King’s Subservient Chicken Web site (subservientchicken.com). To most advertising people, Subservient Chicken, cocreated by the Miami agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and the interactive wizards of the Barbarian Group in Boston, is a known entity, a frequently cited case history. But it is also a landmark in advertising history, the moment that turned every notion of contemporary branding on its ear, legitimized viral advertising. The day the chicken followed its first command is the day when two of the most dynamic companies in the industry came of age.
Subservient Chicken launched on April 7, 2004. This, technically, is when the Barbarian Group’s co founder and chief operating officer, Rick Webb, posted it on his blog one evening after work. Within forty-eight hours almost fifty million people had visited the unbranded site and had asked the chicken to do everything from the charming to the expected to the obscene.
The average time spent per visit was seven and a half minutes. In other words, people were voluntarily spending the equivalent of fifteen thirty-second TV spots with the Subservient Chicken.
The site, technically for BK’s Chicken Tender Crisp, dominated industry talk in the months that followed, and, predictably, the reaction was mixed. While most applauded the gaudy numbers, many questioned the site’s relationship to the brand and, more important, its ability to sell chicken. One week into the campaign, the veteran Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield praised the overall creative idea but ultimately panned BK for intentionally obscuring the connection to the brand (for example, no logo, product shot, or tagline) “in order not to seem too commercial and uncool.”
By the time Garfield’s column ran, visits to the site were being measured in the hundreds of millions, and few people seemed to give a crap if it translated into sales of additional chicken tenders sandwiches. Pundits began talking less about individual product sales and more about “capturing the mind share” of BK’s desired audience, specifically the tough-to-reach eighteen-to thirty-four-year-old male.
That year, Subservient Chicken went on to sweep every major interactive award in the industry, Crispin Porter + Bogusky solidified its reputation as one of America’s most innovative agencies, and the tiny Barbarian Group was suddenly getting calls from the biggest brands and agencies in the world and being asked to prove time and again that it was anything but a one-hit wonder.
“The chicken was the watershed moment that put us on the map but also the first project that proved that interactive worked,” Webb told me during the first of my several visits to the Barbarian Group’s new offices in lower Manhattan. “Everyone had these academic theories about viral marketing,