Overview

The Subservient Chicken was a viral online marketing event staged by the American fast food chain restaurant Burger King to promote its TenderCrisp chicken sandwich in 2004. As the digital component of the larger "Have It Your Way" advertising campaign, the event was centered around an interactive webcam channel where viewers could control the actions of a man dressed in a chicken costume by inputing various commands. In 2014, Burger King relaunched the campaign to promote their Chicken Big King sandwich.

Background

On April 8th, 2004, the Subservient Chicken^[11] website was launched, featuring a video feed of a man standing in a living room above a text input field in which viewers could type commands to see the man performing a variety of actions.

Notable Developments

On April 16th, 2004, the marketing news blog Clickz^[1] published an article about the Subservient Chicken website, which noted it had received over 46 million visits in the first week of launch. On March 7th, 2005, the advertising news blog AdWeek^[2] reported that the site reached more than 14 million unique visitors and 396 million hits. In addition, Burger King reported that TenderCrisp sales had increased an average of 9% per week during the campaign.

List of Commands

According to Wikipedia, there were over 300 commands for the original Subservient Chicken web page.

2014 Relaunch

On April 27th, 2014, the Associated Press^[3] reported that Burger King was relaunching the Subservient Chicken campaign to promote the Chicken Big King triple-decker sandwich. That day, the old Subservient Chicken website was redesigned to feature a video feed of an empty room with a pop-up message informing the viewer of a "Missing Chicken Error" along with options to share the page on various social media accounts. In the coming days, several news sites reported on the relaunch, including NPR,^[4] Business Insider,^[6] USA Today,^[7] Time,^[8] Gawker,^[5] ABC News^[9] and UpRoxx.^[10]

Search Interest

External References

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^[1] Clickz – Burger King Hen Whets Chicken Yen

^[2] AdWeek – Dissecting Subservient Chicken

^[3] AP – Burger King Bringing Back Subservient Chicken

^[4] NPR – Burger King Revives Subservient Chicken

^[5] Gawker – Burger King to Bring Back Bizarre Subservient Chicken Campaign

^[6] Business Insider – Burger King is Bringing Back the Subservient Chicken

^[7] USA Today – Burger King brings back Subservient Chicken

^[8] Time – Burger Kings Subservient Chicken is Back

^[9] ABC News – Burger King Bringing Back Subserv Chicken

^[10] UpRoxx – Burger King is bringinb back chicken and somehow Dustin Diamond is involved

^[11] Subservient Chicken – Subservient Chicken