So I go to see the paper this morning and what do I find on the front page....a picture of a crazy looking chicken and a write up abou the whole story...I immediatly thought of GTP........here ya go, the exact story from the Winnipeg Free Press.
Cheeky chicken takes orders Cheeky chicken takes orders
People flocking to interactive Burger King Internet site
Mon Apr 19 2004
TORONTO -- Why did the chicken cross the road? Because you told it to.
That's the idea behind a cheeky Internet campaign to sell sandwiches for Burger King in keeping with their motto "Have it your way."
If you haven't yet become acquainted with the Subservient Chicken (
www.subservientchicken.com), you probably soon will.
It's a peculiar being: a human dressed in a dirty chicken suit, wearing a red garter belt and ready to obey your every whim, from jumping up and down to playing dead to showing you its rear end.
A grainy quality gives the site a naughty feel, as if you're watching via a webcam on a porn site. Its only connection to Burger King is an unassuming link at the bottom of the screen that reads BK TenderCrisp.
Since going live in early April, the dutiful chicken -- actually a rooster -- has made its way around the globe, attracting flocks of people to its dingy coop, complete with red upholstered couches. The site has received more than 46 million hits in just its first week. The creators say the site attracts hundreds of thousands of "poultry" enthusiasts a day, who each spend about seven minutes per visit trying to find the most absurd task for the chicken to perform.
The two programmers who dreamed up the scheme e-mailed 20 friends on April 7, the date the site went live. Within days, word of mouth about the curious website spread around the world. And voila, the newest Internet fad was born, thrilling Burger King executives trying to inject new energy into the brand.
"It's not like we sent out media alerts or had print ads in daily newspapers," Burger King spokesman Blake Lewis said from the chain's Miami headquarters. "It was driven by those 20 e-mails going to 20 people. They kept hitting the 'tell a friend' button on the site." (Since its online debut, the chicken has appeared in three late, late-night TV ads.)
The character was created to promote Burger King's new Spicy TenderCrisp Chicken Sandwich, set to launch today.
But can a feathery ****-a-doodle-doo sell fast food?
Absolutely, explained Robert Fisher, a marketing professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. The fowl campaign is just one example of a new marketing phenomenon that's taken hold recently. Traditional campaigns have become ineffective in attracting the highly coveted 20- to 35-year-old male consumer, who spends far more time online or playing video games than watching TV. To combat TV's inadequacy, corporations have turned to the Internet to create brand buzz, but they have to compete with media-savvy youth who almost daily create edgy websites that gain celebrity status overnight, thanks to the instantaneous nature of the online world.
"The interactivity of the Internet is something unique and something that is fundamental to creating a relationship (between customers and companies)," said Fisher, commenting on why companies are so desperate to have successful online campaigns.
Fisher said Subservient Chicken, while "pretty unusual," is an excellent example of buzz marketing.
"You're passing it along to your friends, you're discussing it in forums. You are actively seeking out this interaction with the Subservient Chicken," he said. "Those are all advertisers' dreams."
The hype has made its way through all the hipster Internet channels: chat rooms and forums feverishly discuss the chicken and list all the commands it will and won't do.
As for the chicken's saucy qualities?
Lewis said the chicken was programmed to respond with a "no, no, no" gesture should someone order it to do something inappropriate.
"Realistically, we created this thing to be fun. People are going to try all sorts of different things. That's their call," he said. "We've tried to put some reasonable boundaries in this."
