NEW YORK A person dressed up in a chicken suit submits to Web surfers commands on a site that is a part a new campaign from Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King’s TenderCrisp chicken sandwich.
On the site (www.subserviantchicken.com), users are invited to type in an action, such as “kick” or “do a split,” which the chicken performs.
Since its launch last Thursday, the site has become somewhat of a phenomenon, garnering about 20 million hits in less than a week, according to Alex Bogusky, executive creative director at the MDC Partners-backed Miami shop.
“Literally within a day we had 1 million hits,” he said. “It was outrageous.” He credits the popularity of the site to people trying to discover how the chicken is able to follow most typed-in instructions. Some conjectured on blogs that Burger King had hundreds of people in chicken suits around the country being filmed on Web cams. In fact, CP+B came up with about 400 different actions that the chicken could do, and then filmed them in the course of a day in Los Angeles.
“Because things refresh at a slow rate on Web cams, you can camouflage where one clip goes into another,” Bogusky said. “There were all these jumps in the motion anyway, so it was pretty easy at that point to weave [clips] together.”
The online effort complements three spots that also broke last Thursday. The ads, directed by Rocky Morton of MJZ, show a person in a chicken suit living in an apartment with 20-somethings. In one ad, a woman drops a pencil so she can watch the chicken bend down to fetch it. “Chicken, just the way you like it,” a voiceover states. “Have it your way” remains the tagline.
CP+B Puts BK Chicken Through Its Paces
