How a Chicken Hatched the Digital Marketing Revolution
It was the fall of 2004 when a doe-eyed freshman began her college career, marching down the path of marketing, determined to land a big agency job and quickly excel in her career. If you think I’m referring to myself, I’m not. I’m sure that was the experience of many of my peers, but it wasn’t mine. I, on the other hand, knew marketing sounded fun so I majored in it having no idea what to expect, nor what I’d do with my degree when I got out. But this story isn’t about me. It’s about a chicken.As I progressed through college, I learned about billboards, the marketing mix and it’s quadruple P’s (product, price, place, promotion) and how do write a headline to address the increase in dog bite incidents amongst U.S. Postal workers. All useful, I’m sure, to someone. But I remained less than intrigued. That is, until I came across a particular advertising campaign buried deep within the depths of one of my 25-page marketing books.Instead of focusing on how this brand had utilized direct mail, television commercials and phone book advertising, this campaign involved the use of a costumed person, dressed as a chicken, which allowed people to dictate it’s actions via a website to sell a sandwich. Yeah, you know it, the Subservient Chicken campaign for Burger King’s TenderCrisp chicken sandwich offering by Crispin + Porter Bogusky and The Barbarian Group.After reading everything I could about this campaign, I raced to the closest computer lab clear across campus (because, back in the day of the early 2000s, that’s where we accessed the internet) and participated in the advertising campaign. There I was, interacting with advertising that lived online in the form of an obedient chicken.
I was hooked, and it wasn’t because of the novelty. While that was part of it, I mean, who can resist giving commands to a chicken to jumping jacks, what really intrigued me was the platform this campaign was built upon. It wasn’t traditional marketing at play here, it was something else. Something I finally wanted to be a part of.
This campaign, in all its weirdness, is responsible for even my first job out of college being primarily digital marketing focused. Unfortunately, in my college career, the curriculum hadn’t caught up with the current digital landscape so I had to learn fast on how to blog, how to launch social media for a brand and who to listen to in the space for the latest marketing innovations (at the time, Seth Godin, by the way). But to me, and to many more scholarly people, this was truly one of the early pioneers of digital advertising.
According to AdWeek’s 2005 article, this phenomenal foul was seeded in chat rooms and quickly gained momentum. Within a day after launch, the site received a million hits. While it wasn’t blatantly labeled as a marketing ploy for Burger King, this seemed to be the key to its success. People were interacting with this campaign unlike anything else at the time, something that may never have happened if the authenticity had been in question. To supplement this campaign, only a few late-night TV spots aired and a single print ad through a hyper-understanding of the primary audience for the sandwich: the coveted 18-45 year market.
So the big question remains, did Burger King serve up a winning campaign? According to Burger King’s senior director of media and global collaboration at the time, visitors to the site stayed for six to seven minutes, sandwich sales increased steady each week and escalated the bird to super stardom.
Subservient Chicken Google Trends
What’s most fascinating about this whole campaign, however, is that the website, concept and even the famous chicken are still going. In April of 2014, 10 years after hatching the concept, the chicken returned to bring this quirky animal to even more people.
Subservient Chicken Redemption
The longevity of this campaign truly attests to the fact that incorporating an integrated, digital strategy as the central component of this advertising execution allowed it to take unprecedented flight. And beyond simply being digitally focused, audiences, for arguably the first time, were able to be an active part of an advertising campaign at scale.
No wonder I was so inspired by the vision of this concept, because it was truly visionary.
