Burger King hopes you'll order around its subservient online bird and then maybe order some fries, too.
By GREG AUMAN
Published April 22, 2004
[Getty Images]
An actor dressed as a chicken joins subway riders waiting on the platform at the Rockefeller Center subway station in New York City recently. The chicken was greeting the public in conjunction with Burger King’s new Web site, www.subservientchicken.com, featuring an Internet chicken who obeys commands.
Internet fads, as a rule, come and go quickly. This one will come and go, and do nearly anything else you command.
The Dancing Baby, cute as it was, was never able to take requests like "do YMCA" or, God forbid, "do the Electric Slide." If asked, the all-knowing butler from AskJeeves.com would neither genuflect nor strike the Heisman Trophy pose.
Now, more addicting and disturbing than anything before it, comes the strangely popular subservientchicken.com.
Visit the site and you get a Webcam view of what looks like every cheap apartment you ever had, complete with the nondescript couch, beige carpet and black halogen light against the wall.
That, and a guy in a chicken suit who will do whatever you ask.
"Get chicken the way you like it," reads a box inviting your curious request.
Type in "jump up and down," and a second later the chicken jumps up and down. Lay an egg, you type, and sure enough, it pretends to lay an egg. The more things you try, the more things the amazing chicken can do.
And he's not a cartoon. He's real - if you can call a guy in a chicken suit "real."
You're impressed, you're hooked - and you're not alone. The site was launched on April 8 when one of its architects sent out a single e-mail announcement to 20 friends, in what is known as "viral marketing." Since then, subservientchicken.com has drawn more than 46-million hits, spreading across the country almost exclusively by word of mouth.
The edgy site is produced by, of all people, Burger King, which is taking a sly, underground path for the latest riff on its "Have it your way" slogan.
"It's totally insane," said BK spokesman Blake Lewis, who said the site has drawn interest from everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Good Morning America. "This thing is popping up everywhere, and the reception has been nothing short of stellar."
The site gets a three-second plug at the end of commercials Burger King is airing during late-night talk shows and on cable channels such as Spike TV and MTV, all geared at landing customers from the sought-after twentysomething male demographic.
"What's been unique is the persistence value of the site," Lewis said. "The average length of visit is running 7 or 8 minutes, which by Web standards is a long time. You can spend tons of money in traditional media outlets and not do a very good job of reaching this demographic."
The site assumes we all have time on our hands, and hackers have proved the assumption right. Search Google for info on the chicken and you'll find hackers who have discovered the source code for the site, isolating the keywords that trigger 334 known chicken routines that have been recorded.
These range from obvious - lift left foot, flap your wings - to ridiculously random. Try typing in ninja, rodeo or . . . masochist. Each gets a response.
The chicken does sports: Type Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Tyson, Jagr, or delay of game. It does impersonations, as in Schwarzenegger, Travolta, and the most impressive, Morita. The chicken accounts for poor spelling: ballet fans can type in pirowette, pirowet or piroutte and set the fowl spinning. ("Pleya" works just as well as plie, too.) Predictably, almost everyone tells the chicken to do something sexual, or anatomically impossible. Most of these requests end with the chicken walking up to the camera and wagging a disapproving feather. It doesn't matter how you spell "defecate"; the chicken won't do it.
The architects built in some in-jokes, the kinds of things video-game enthusiasts coincidentally call Easter eggs. The Miami ad firm that created the site is Crispin, Porter and Bogusky, and if you type in "Crispin," you'll get a surprise.
So have fun with the chicken. Tell your friends. Giggle at how the chicken responds the same way to "McDonald's" as it does to "WMD." When it comes to killing off-hours or destroying a productive day, you can have it your way.
