Subservient Chicken

The idea came out of a television spot. Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Burger King's Miami agency, had made an ad for the new TenderCrisp chicken sandwich in which a man in his living room orders a person in a chicken suit around, under the tagline "Chicken the way you like it," a riff on the chain's "Have it your way." According to Jeff Benjamin, an executive creative director at the agency, the campaign evolved from that TV idea into an interactive one: a website where the chicken would obey you. The Barbarian Group built it. The page looked like a webcam feed of a living room; you typed a command into a box, and the chicken acted it out from a library of pre-recorded clips.

There were more than three hundred responses. Moonwalk, Riverdance, tango, yoga, raise the roof, lay egg, Walk Like an Egyptian, the Electric Slide, the Macarena, air guitar, hide behind the sofa, watch TV. Benjamin later said the actor originally hired turned out to be claustrophobic in the suit, so one of the costume's designers wore it instead, managing about six moves at a stretch before the crew had to fan him down. The site went live in early April 2004, promoted by three 30-second spots on MTV, Comedy Central, Spike and BET. Within a week Burger King was claiming 46 million hits, six to eight million visitors a day, and average visits of seven to nine minutes. "What has made this campaign work," spokesman Blake Lewis told ClickZ, "is a certain degree of mystery."

The chicken became Burger King's house mascot for a while: a rodeo ad in March 2006 for the Tendercrisp Cheesy Bacon sandwich ("Big Buckin' Chicken"), a dirt-bike sequel, a boxing-match stunt between two chickens for the spicy version. In April 2014, for the character's tenth anniversary, Burger King brought him back to sell the Chicken Big King in a short film about a washed-up star training for a comeback. By then the site itself had become the standard case study in viral marketing, the thing every agency pitch of the late 2000s promised to repeat.