Thursday, October 13, 2011

Advertising That Does Not Suck: BK's Subservient Chicken

This went viral way back in the early days when the interwebs were dial up and in black and white...  Clumpy and Crumbly reminded me of this...

The Subservient Chicken - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
  ...there is "The Subservient Chicken" web page. On the page, a man in a chicken costume performs a wide range of actions based on a user's input, showing pre-recorded footage and appearing like an interactive webcam.[4] The site takes literally the advertising slogan "Get chicken just the way you like it". The site launched on April 8, 2004. The site was created for CP+B and BK by The Barbarian Group and is hosted at GSI in Kansas City, Missouri. "The guy in the suit was originally an actor, but he was claustrophobic in the suit, so he wouldn’t do it. And we had to use one of the costume’s designers... He would do about six moves and then we would have to fan him off because he would get so hot in the costume," says CP+B ECD Jeff Benjamin.[5]
There are more than three hundred commands that the Subservient Chicken will respond to...
'via Blog this'
If I remember correctly, the web page went up before the commercials and other than a subtle link reading "Get chicken just the way you like it" at the bottom of the page leading to Burger King, there was originally no obvious connection to the fast food chain.  I think this is because many of us who were too cool for school would have originally ignored it, otherwise.  But we bit and it went viral.

This was still running on the Burger King site until fairly recently, but I could not find it today.

http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/subservient-chicken.html

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