Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [37]
As we spoke, I thought of the first time I had visited the Subservient Chicken site in 2004. While sitting in my office at Y&R and still smarting from my tour on the KFC account, on a whim I commanded the chicken to eat KFC. The chicken briefly stared at me, then slowly stepped forward, put its finger down its throat, and pantomimed vomiting.
The Author Knowingly Invites His Nineteen-Year-Old
Nephew to a Gang Bang
Spring 2000
When an account that has been at an agency for twenty-three years threatens to leave, and that agency is struggling, the agency doesn’t put one or two top teams to work on the problem. It has a full-blown gang bang, with every available creative person and team in the agency network working, if things are especially desperate, against multiple strategies. This is how I got recruited into the KFC mess. This is also why I recruited my favorite creative team to work with me and how, once we had a semblance of a half-assed idea, I decided to enlist an advertising virgin into the mix, my nineteen-year-old nephew Joey, who was on summer break from classes at Florida State University and who happened to be a precocious singer, songwriter, and guitarist.
The idea was to create a series of quirky “Chickenquest” visual tales starring a younger slacker demographic. But rather than have on-camera dialogue or a lot of clichéd announcer voice-over, they would be backed by crude musical ditties performed by a comedian/musician, like Adam Sandler. Before we pitched the unformed concept within the agency, I called my nephew, who was mixing cement for my brother at the time, gave him our thoughts, the Adam Sandler–esque direction, and asked him to crank out a few rough demos in his garage that night.
The next day, I played a song called “Dem Bones” for the agency’s chief creative officer. It was about an everyman who never went anywhere—art galleries, weddings, romantic dates—without a bucket of original-recipe chicken.
He smiled. “Got anything else?” We did. I played another track called “Chicken Strippy Rendezvous” about love and chicken strips in a tollbooth setting. He smiled again and told me to get my nephew into the agency the next day to do more.
In all, the four of us came up with a half-dozen ditty-backed scenarios that would form one of several campaigns to be presented in the meeting. I was pleased to help round out the presentation. But I was convinced we were a token novelty act whose role was to show the wacky extremes to which our agency was capable of going, mere placeholders for a more conventional agency recommendation turned out by another team. It wouldn’t be the first time my work had been used for such a purpose.
On the day of the pitch, when I was called into the room, I did a simple strategic and visual setup for the grim, poker-faced clients gathered in the conference room. Then I told them that ideally we could enlist someone like Adam Sandler to perform the music, but for now I was turning the rest of the presentation over to my nephew, on break from classes at Florida State University and hours removed from a stint as a mason’s laborer. When Joey walked into the room with an acoustic guitar over his shoulder and a harmonica around his neck, a funny thing happened.
The stone-faced clients smiled.
Later that day, around 7:00 p.m., long after Joey had taken the train north to my sister’s house in the suburbs, the chief creative officer came into my office. “Good job today,” he said.
“Glad I could help. How’d it go?”
“They liked your ditties.”
“That’s good. Are they still gonna fire us?”
“No. They bought your campaign.”
“No shit. Did they buy Adam Sandler?”
He shook his head. They didn’t like the campaign enough to spend millions on a celebrity. “They bought your nephew.”
“Holy shit.”
“They’re all yours now,” he said, and then started to walk away. “But I don’t want them,” I called after him. “I never did fast food before.