Happy 5th Birthday, Subservient Chicken
Rick Webb
Co-founder, COO : New York
topics: Viral Marketing, Installations, Media Planning, Measurement and Analytics, and Automotive
filed under: Barbarian, Viral Marketing, and Flash
Five years. Holy moly.
Five years ago today, a bunch of youngsters at two companies called The Barbarian Group and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky launched a small minisite three days in advance of the late night running of some broadcast spots. They wanted to iron out any last minute wrinkles in the site by emailing it around to a few more friends, and get a little early buzz before the spots ran.
In the next 48 hours, before the spots even had a chance to air, the little viral site that could had already bombarded the poor XServe in Crispin’s internal data center with 25 million hits. Within days, a cultural phenomenon was spawned.
All for a creepy dude in a chicken suit with garters, who looked like he was running some sort of shady web cam operation.
AAnd here it is, five years later. Let’s take a moment to pay tribute to this noble chicken, and let’s look at the impact he had, and where his place might be in marketing today. Man, it’s a good thing I document everything in my life. The events are getting hazy, the facts are starting to be lost to the sands of time. Some pictures I can only find as lo-res GIFs. But we shall persevere!
The creation myth
Here is what I remember. I remember we were a small, hard working bunch of people. The Barbarian Group in April of ’04 had about 15 people. We probably had the same number of projects. We were scrappy and we hustled, and we had a single office at 332 Newbury Street (next door to our current office, if you’ve been there).
It felt as though we had just taken down the Flickerball table in the back of the office. Flickerball was a game we invented in lieu of having the disposable cash for the typical dot com foosball or pool table. It basically required flicking pocket change through the pre-drilled hole designed for routing cables through a fabricated particle-board cubicle desk. The game involved strange rules like “invoking the CD” and other convoluted ceremony most likely lost to time. The game room lost out to our need for Ben to have an office, with a door. We were doing pretty well, growing, and the open office was getting too loud for his new business calls. – Keith Butters, Partner and Flash Developer, Barbarian Group
I remember Keith and I walking into Benjamin’s office, and he was on AOL Instant Messenger with Jeff Benjamin, as he often was back then. We’d already done several jobs with Jeff, both at Goodby and at Crispin, and he and Benjamin spent a lot of time talking on IM.
“Hey… so… do you think we could do this thing…?” Benjamin said.
He said, “Hey Keith!” (Which usually was a signal that he was about to pitch a new idea to me, and wanted to make sure it was feasible, possible, mad, awesome, etc.). “Can we make a chicken do whatever you tell it to? On the Internet?” – Keith
He proceeded to outline how he and Jeff wanted to simulate a fake web cam where it seemed like there was really someone on the other end, but it was fake. Benjamin was always asking about wacky things – one of his great talents, to this day, is to have a decent grasp on technology, but to quickly ascertain from technically-minded people if they were possible before going too far along. Keith continues:
Now, one would think that the natural response to a question like that would be, “What the fuck are you talking about?” Looking back I’m actually amazed that I didn’t react with that kind of cynical incredulousness. But this is the Barbarian Group, and we were (and still are) up for anything. So, my unfazed response was simply, “Yeah, I think so. Why?” I got up and walked into his office and saw him typing a bunch of stuff into an IM window. That’s when I got confused. Who was he talking to? It was a potential client. A real client. At that point I think I mumbled something about wanting to make sure I could pull it off, and Ben said yeah, we should probably do that.
Keith and I rapidly envisioned using a series of video clips tagged with a bunch of keywords that would parse a text input string from a user and show the right clip, thus giving the appearance of a constant video feed. Keith continues:
Without doing much testing, and believing there was pretty much no way in hell someone was going to pay us to make this thing, I just kind of said yeah, we could do it. Totally possible. I think Rick and Ben worked out the details all day, popping into my office to ask questions about the details, possibilities and probabilities. – Keith
“Well okay, then.” That was about the extent of our technical validation of concepts back then. Keith may have given me a ballpark number of weeks, but usually, back then, there was never any time. Agencies hadn’t worked into their production schedule the thought of marketing on the internet until well after the broadcast spots had been storyboarded and, often, even shot and edited.
This situation was no different, and before we started Jeff sent over the finished spots. They were funny. And they were already done and ready to air.
This brings up two important points, I think.
The idea and the sell-through
First, the chicken – the character – was borne outside of our knowledge. That was all Crispin’s baby.
Secondly, the thing everyone wants to know: who thought up the chicken? Everyone makes a big mystery out of it, but if you ask me, the mystery is more about why everyone wishes it was a single person in an ah-ha moment. We get that a lot still. People want it to be dramatic. As if doing things methodically until you get a great idea is disappointing. As if coming up with a good idea should be easy.
Here’s the stone cold truth: Jeff and Alex and Rob and Mark came up with some hilarious spots. Jeff took it to Benjamin, and locked in two rooms on IM, they hashed out a great idea. Then Benjamin brought us in to help make it flesh. I think the credit for the idea can really go to those five, and I think without Keith dealing with some of the Flash shit, it never would have worked.
I also think that there’s a massively-underrated kudos in here for Crispin: selling the thing through. To be perfectly frank, even as we were building the thing, I never believed it would launch. We here at TBG are insanely good these days for convincing clients to take risks. But in 2004, there was no way we ever could have sold the Chicken through. Sometimes getting the green light is as important as the idea. Most of the time, if you ask me.
Knowing direct clients better now, I don’t mean to imply that BK had to be duped. We just didn’t meet them, or see any of it. It was completely opaque to us, as it often is in agency relationships. We met the client, eventually, at the One Show later, and his remarks lead me to believe he knew what he was getting into. Mad props to BK are absolutely due. At the time, though, it seemed so amazing to us that something like this would happen. We constantly lived in fear of it getting killed or not launching.
Production
So, then, things kicked into high gear. I gave Benjamin and Jeff a price1. Rob T. over at Crispin signed it, and I assigned Jennifer Iwanicki, our director of production at the time, to handle the project management on our end. I acted as the information architect, and keith was the Flash developer. Aubrey, our CTO, kept an eye on the tech side and worked on server stuff with Jordan Kilpatrick at Crispin, whose title at the time was “Web Geek.”
and then somehow it became a REAL JOB. That night I went out to dinner with my wife (wife-to-be at the time) and some friends from New York who were shooting a commercial in town. I remember thinking to myself (somewhat upset with the over-confident promise I had made), “Yeah, I’d love to go out and eat and drink on your production’s dime all night with you guys, but I gotta go figure out how to make a chicken do what you tell it to do.” – Keith
And then, for four weeks, we just jammed. Ben flew out to LA with the Crispin gang to shoot the clips. He filled hard drives and hard drives of clips and then came home and started editing. Keith started building the Flash shell using fake clips and a minimalist layout provided to him by Jeff. Ben, Keith and I worked in tandem.
Benjamin spent 12 hours a day locked in his office in Final Cut chopping apart and editing hundreds of clips. Benjamin’s often made the comment that editing for interactive video is chopping things up, while editing linear video is splicing them together, and if you think about taking long clips and chopping them into hundreds of small clips, and you know anything about Final Cut Pro (especially at v2 or so as it was in 2004), you know that the asset management can be a pain. Benjamin is massively underrated in his attention to detail in these sorts of projects, and he managed it all himself.
Meanwhile, Keith got to work on building the guts of the site. The two big challenges here were parsing the text to find keywords, and not missing anything with weird punctuation, etc., and then queueing up the clips so you knew which one was next and the request to the server was made and the clip was loading even before you needed it. Streaming technology was not used. It was all just FLVs coming over port 80.
Ben was in charge of dealing with the videos. There wasn’t time for lots of cooks in the kitchen. I only had a couple requests. First, I said we needed a good number of clips where you couldn’t exactly tell what the chicken was doing, so that users would maybe project what they were thinking onto what they were seeing, selling the trick to themselves. I also told him that we were going to run into trouble with buffering and that the gaps between video clips could get really weird. He came up with the brilliant idea of encoding them at 4 frames per second. I thought it was mad, yet perfect for the grungy, pornography-inspired, live feed style of the project. 4FPS video would never be acceptable today, even for a job like this, but thankfully the client said it was ok. – Keith
We enlisted the help of Mike Rubenstein, who at the time I think was a “web designer” for a title. I can’t remember (Mike?) Mike is one of our oldest employees and he and I got to work adding all the keywords we could find. Mike wrangled the vast resources of the 10 or so other Barbarians and got to Tagging. He worked closely with Benjamin on getting the next batch of new clips. Jennifer coordinated with Crispin, since they were tagging too, and had made a lot of tags while shooting. Says Mike:
Basically I had to go through and watch every clip (I think there were like 340 or so at first?) and mark up the xml with any keywords or phrases that seemed relevant or could be construed as being a funny association. – Mike Rubenstein, Barbarian Art Director
Keith continues:
I was trying to devise a system that would make it easy for the whole company help make things work. I knew that we were going to need a TON of data. Otherwise, once people got past telling the chicken to “dance” followed by profanity (and man, did people type in profanity!), the rouse would be up. We needed to make less than 400 video clips seem like millions through sleight of hand and clever ambiguousness. I came up with some Actionscript, inspired by a program I had written when i was like 10 on my Commodore 64, which was in turn Inspired by the movie War Games. Replaced “How about a nice game of Chess?” with “Have it your way,” and we were off to the races.There were two things about this that made it really exciting for me. First was that I had not just done simple keyword matching, where you would get all the results that matched a given word. I devised a system for matching phrases, words and fragments. Then the script would give a score for each possible video clip based on those phrases, and serve the highest scoring video. Second was that we decided to have everyone in the company participate in adding words and phrases to the data set. The catch was, that only a few people in the company knew what any video clip was supposed to be. So, we had people describing clips not based on what was shot, but what they perceived to be the shot. (The former psychology student in me LOVED this methodology). It made all the difference. Stuff we never thought about when making the shot-list magically seemed more descriptive of the video clips than the original. Rick, Ben, Robert, Mike, Eva, Kevin, and everyone else were adding new terms at breakneck speed. And the data set grew. We added typos and misspellings. Anything that might make it seem more real.
When you typed in something, anything at all, you were going to see a video of that dude in a chicken suit that made sense, or at least seemed like it made sense. – Keith
Then, amazingly, two weeks before the broadcast air date, we were “done2.” From there, it was a matter of tagging the clips with more and more things. Mike wrangled some Barbarians, and Crispin was doing their own QA/Tagging as well. Clip requests would come in from everyone, and Mike would update the text file. Mike continues:
There were a few revisions along the way, either with clips getting swapped out or cut, or just changes that had to be made from a functional standpoint. If things didn’t work out from a user’s perspective, or the phrasing needed to be adjusted to feel more “right.” – Rubenstein
I remember in this period being insanely excited about the project and finally being able to show it to my girlfriend one night at home. She took the laptop from me, and typed “have a seat.”
The chicken did nothing.
It was clear, from there, that we needed a lot more keywords. Polite terminology, various types of slang, British and Scottish English, Spanish slang. We kept tagging for every moment we had.
Finally, we were ready to launch.
So far as I can tell from my IMs, emails, etc., we went live somewhere around 10:30 AM, on April 7th, 20043.
The viral spread (ew)
Some people emailed it to a few friends. I posted it in my Livejournal. Yes. It was 2004. I had a Livejournal. Within hours, I was getting questions and comments on my LJ about the chicken, so I locked the post, and wrote a new one4.
I also IM’d it to about 10 friends, as I’m sure everyone at Crispin did, owing to the curious pause in my IM logs between us and Crispin from 10PM April 6 to about 10 AM on April 8, when we start talking about how the traffic is overloading the machines and we need to move it to a bigger server.
Says Keith:
A few days later, after a couple client reviews, Rick sent the link to a few LiveJournal friends for testing. We needed to make sure that things were working as promised, and we were all way too tired from working so much to tell if it was any good. I was completely skeptical. Why would anyone spend time with this? It had some technical merits. It was definitely original, and was fun to make. But what fucking idiot would care to spend any time playing with this thing? (Sorry.)The following day. The server crashed. I was terrified. Thought it was my fault, like I had written some bad code in a 4am haze of too many red bulls and too few cigarettes. I don’t remember if it was Rick or Aubrey who brought the news that it was actually traffic. Wow.
The next few days there were all kinds of blog posts and message boards (yep, people still used the BBSes back then) about this thing the subservient chicken. I read everything. I couldn’t believe that some people thought it was real. Like, there was a guy in a chicken suit in a dirty hotel room, somewhere, waiting to do what you typed into a web site. How could he handle all the requests so fast? Were there multiple chickens? – Keith
The catalyst
Every viral success needs a catalyst. That is, it needs enough people to look at it, and to like it, in order that enough people have seen it that it can spread from them to a progressively larger group of people. Whole websites are devoted to this, now, but back then – and we’ll get into this a little later – there were relatively few places thinking about and talking about viral spread and memes, and there were even fewer places that could actually move traffic. Blogs were, by and large, just beginning. It was impossible to get anything on the home page of Yahoo! or MSN. Digg did not exist5. Nor did its clones such as Reddit, etc. Twitter was just a glimmer in the eye of the Blogger founders.
As a sidenote, I think this is one of the greatest things about Twitter and social media – it is so much easier to get a viral hit off the ground these days.
There was, back in 2004, the Slashdot effect, of course. And while Slashdot did start talking about the Chicken in May, Slashdot was always very tech focused, and so not very useful for marketing meme propagation.
Really the site that caused the take off was the massively popular and influential blog Boing Boing.
Less than 24 hours after the site’s launch, Xeni Jardin posted about the site on Boing Boing. The post is still up along with a follow-up post a few days later dissecting the text file of the commands that Mike had made with Crispin.
I asked Xeni today what she remembered about posting about the Chicken, and she said:
We blog about 20-50 items a day on Boing Boing. Multiply that by the five years since this post appeared, and the sheer fact that any of us remember it speaks to its impact.
We’d seen lots of viral ad experiments before, but this one was particularly interesting for people for two reasons. First, it toyed with the dirty underworld of transgressive webcam culture in a way we didn’t expect from a brand like BK. And secondly, when Boing Boing readers discovered the web server file containing a list of “dirty” commands, we felt like we’d hacked into an ad campaign that had been designed to hack into our heads, undetected.
It doesn’t feel too dated now. That’s pretty incredible. They could launch this today and it wouldn’t be out of place.
In other news, Jesus, 5 years? I can’t believe it. We’re all old. – Xeni Jardin
Keith echos this sentiment:
Then one of my favorite things happened. We got “hacked.” Of course, hacked as in people looked at a publicly available text file. So, we had to take out some profanity and censor bars and hide a couple files. This made the site even more popular. (I still think that getting hacked is the greatest driver of traffic there will ever be on the Internet. No ad campaign is going to ever come close, even ones faking getting hacked). – Keith
Other sites picked it up, of course. Blogdex notes 50 blog mentions and it’s interesting, now, poking through Google seeing who else was talking about it. I found the Fark post, showing that they found it by April 8th, 5:15 PM and the post was clicked on 26,028 times. Fark’s power to move viral traffic was not known to me then, though I have since come to bow down before their traffic shifting prowess. They were also the ones who found my Livejournal post and caused me to hide it.
Tracking propagation
We, like all good interactive marketers at the time, were glued to two sites to find out what the web was thinking each day – Blogdex and Daypop. I preferred Blogdex, Benjamin relied on Daypop, but really, anyone dealing with advertising on the web read one or both of those back then. These were the two primary (well, really, only) methods we had to track how fast and how far and wide the chicken spread.
Cameron Marlow, the creator Blogdex, is now a friend of mine. He’s a researcher over at Facebook now, having moved on to Yahoo! not long after the chicken topped Blogdex. Today he dug up our old correspondence about the chicken – I emailed him when the chicken hit the top of Blogdex. We emailed and he detailed his algorithm for calculating rankings on Blogdex, and I emailed about how excited I was that Crispin and BK let us do something like that. It’s comically pie-eyed and naive, reading it now, giving away algorithms and not talking about the client, or theory, or the consumer. Ha.
It was from these two sites that we first realized the magnitude of our success.
Spreading far and wide
Some media publications picked it up, such as Wired and the then-nacent Marketing Vox. Those, however, were a few days later, and while they were good added oomph, the hoards had already been unleashed.
Also, finally, I’ve dug up some really interesting blog posts from back then from people who were unknown to me at the time but I have now come to either know or know of. Here’s Robert Scoble’s post on it, for example, and Jane McGonigal, the noted alternative reality game designer, blogged about the chicken later in the year. This is particularly interesting to me since not very much later in 2004 McGonigal would be one of the driving forces behind I Love Bees, the landmark ARG game for Halo 2 that blew everyone away and became the other marketing darling of 2004. Finally, it’s funny to see my ex-MSN-exec, now-friend and noted foppish dandy Rex Sorgatz’s blog posts about the chicken here and here thus proving Rex has been blogging about industry stuff long before I got around to stopping pining away for girls and fjords in my Livejournal. Props, Rex.
Finally, in a staggering display of how quckly viral marketing comes and goes, by May 12, 2004 – exactly thirty five days after its launch, the Chicken is not just the subject of a large article in the uber-mainstream USA Today. No, not just that, but that the article is actually about how the chicken is not going to sell out or go mainstream. Stunning.
The impact
So, then, then impact. The chicken cleaned up at awards season, of course. It took home the Grand Clio, and up in Boston we won best of show in the regional Hatch awards:
(I wish to all things sacred I had a better copy of that image. Hilarious.)
In Cannes, it won two lions – a bronze and a Cyber gold. It did not, however, win a Titanium lion, “which many had pegged for the top honor” Roger Pe said at the time. No Titanium was awarded that year. “There wasn’t something as unique and innovative as BMW Films” said Cyber jury president Bob Greenberg6.
Nonetheless, it was the toast of the season. Writes The Sydney Morning Herald:
A bloke in a cheap chicken suit is leading the charge to upend the global advertising industry.The world’s smartest ad makers paid their respects this week in the French resort of Cannes to the “Subservient Chicken”, a feather-suited man who features on a website doing whatever he is told by people typing in commands on their computers.
The site, created covertly by Burger King last year, has proven a worldwide hit, attracting more than 20 million visitors from 189 countries. It is all thanks to what started out as a “viral” marketing campaign that has since turned the Subservient Chicken into a pin-up for the ad industry.
Viral advertising was big news at the Cannes International Advertising Festival as the industry debated the public’s waning interest in 30-second TV commercials. – The Sydney Morning Herald
Impact on the internet
It’s made its mark on the web as well. A search of Amazon.com indicates that the chicken is mentioned in nearly 80 books – the vast majority about marketing and social media. I was also pleased to see it name-checked in Wired Editor Chris Anderson’s seminal work The Long Tail, as well as Public Relations for Dummies by four authors – including Richard Kirshenbaum.
It’s got its own7 Wikipedia page, and it’s own Snopes urban legends page (you’d think it’d be obvious by now that there’s not really a live chicken, but apparently people still fall for it). It has it’s own Urban Dictionary page (my favorite part: “the only reason I don’t diss this completely is because Nikita likes it”).
It was nominated for two Webbys that year, and the Webbys ultimately named it one of the twelve most influential online videos of all time.
The imitators and tributes
Then there are the tributes, imitators, ripoffs and homages, of course. There were easily 15-20 Subservient-Somethings8 we were asked to make in ’04 and ’05 from different marketers and agencies. It still happens from time to time, though now usually they’re unaware of our connection. Several other marketers put it to good use – most notably9 the Virtual Bartender later in ‘04. Of the parodies, my favorites were always the Subservient President – long since gone but a great parody of Cheney being secretly in control of Bush. I was writing the creator for a while. He was a professor, if I recall. Then of course later on there was the world-famous Stewie Live from the Family Gay, which is just kind of awesome to have exist.
Impact on digital marketing today
A quick look finds that the Chicken has made its way into the coursework at places such as Harvard and MIT and countless others. There are 461 references to the chicken in Lexis Nexis.
I think, more than anything, that our comments over on our Subservient Chicken case study are still true:
It was a pretty awesome idea, really, and Crispin Porter + Bogusky was genius in getting it sold to their clients. But more than anything, we think, what it did was validate these lines of thinking: you can “talk to” the Internet populace. You can take risks with your message. You can get the word out without necessarily blowing a lot of money. And that you can utilize the relationships – electronic and personal – between people and groups to spread ideas and messages, and it can still work even if the message is, at its core, commercial in nature. Sometimes.
Of course we didn’t dream it up alone. And of course we don’t claim credit for inventing viral marketing or word of mouth or making stupid stuff for the Internet. We were simply fortunate enough to have been involved in the phenomenon that proved all of the theories correct. Lord knows we’ve had lots of theories that didn’t pan out. But this one did. In a big way. – Barbariangroup.com
I think this is an important point. As Jardin said above – viral marketing was a well-known theory. And lots of people were trying to figure out how to harness it. We were simply lucky enough to be the ones, with Crispin, who had the first hit. It’s a well known fact that there have been bigger hits in terms of sheer numbers. We simply proved that viral marketing could work on a mainstream scale10. We didn’t perfect it.
The “did it work” angle
Then, of course, there’s the question of whether or not it worked. This is mostly answered now, I think. But to recap, yes, it worked. We have the data shared to us by BK and Crispin at the time, of course, but that’s private. Adweek comments that:
About a month after the sandwich debuted, BK reported that sales had steadily increased an average of 9% a week. Since then the company has seen “double-digit” growth of awareness of the TenderCrisp sandwich and “significantly increased” chicken sandwich sales. And the TenderCrisp does sell better than the original sandwich. – Adweek
In another article they continue that “Overall BK sales are up and awareness is plentiful, making BK’s TenderCrisp Chicken Sandwich campaign a winner.”
When the campaign launched, this was no guarantee. Nearly all the early press left open for debate whether online chatter would translate into sales. Different philosophies have been derived from this, of course. There’s the whole attention economy philosophy, one of which I personally still remain skeptical.
I think Jardin was more onto something – that it was something “we didn’t expect from a brand like BK.” A brand speaking to people in their medium, knowingly, and in their language.
Benjamin often illustrates it thus:
You’re standing in the middle of the street, and there’s a Burger King on one corner, and a McDonald’s on the other. You gotta eat something and those are pretty much the only choices. What do you do? You go to the one who brightened your day a little bit, who did something funny. Who spoke to you. – Benjamin Palmer, CEO, Barbarian Group
This, of course, has always been the point of advertising. I think everyone who was skeptical of the chicken’s efficacy was conflating the subversive creative – directed at a less-than-mainstream, but still very large audience – with the fact that the impressions were free. Free impressions are still impressions. And the creative clearly resonated, or people wouldn’t have passed it around. The chicken was a case study because people were inspired to pass it around, for free, in massive numbers. The reason they were so inspired is simply because the creative was great.
The chicken’s legacy
The world of online advertising has changed massively since April of 2004, but it never ceases to amaze me how the Chicken has endured. There are hundreds of mentions on Twitter, a service that wouldn’t even come into existence for 4 more years. Just last week, I went to the O’Reilly Ignite SF event, and none other than web celebrity and Tekzill host Veronica Belmont herself in her Ignite talk talked it up. Today she Twitter DM’d me:
The chicken is the gold standard which all corp. memes should strive to achieve! Fun and clever. – Veronica Belmont
(gotta love Twitter.)
Two years after its launch, Scott Johnson wrote in Adweek:
On Dec. 28, 1895 in Paris, the Lumière brothers – Auguste and Louis – showed a 50-second film called L’Arrivée d’un train en la Gare de la Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station). It was the first public exhibition of a motion picture. Der Spiegel reported that the audience panicked at the site of the oncoming train and scattered to get out of the way. Some modern commentators doubt that a sophisticated 19th-century French audience actually believed they were about to be run over. Whether they dove into the aisles or not, it’s a safe assumption that, never having seen a motion picture before, the crowd was impressed and, upon leaving the theater, told everyone they knew about the images they had just seen.The film had no characters, no stars and no plot. But it didn’t matter, because it had something no one had ever experienced before – moving pictures.
So it was with Subservient Chicken. The content people saw when they visited that the site wasn’t that remarkable. What was remarkable was the interactivity – the very fact that the consumer controlled the action in what seemed to be an almost limitless way thanks to the cunning of its creators11. – Adweek
I particularly like this, of course, because of the debated status of the Lumiere brothers as the firsts in this sort of thing. It wasn’t the point, being first. It was being seen by a large number of people.
New challenges in marketing
I often think of marketing as a successive thing – first came Flash minisites, then came viral marketing, then social networking, then Youtube and viral videos, and then social media. But if you look closely on the screenshot of my Blogdex post up there, you’ll notice in the bookmark bar that I was already hooked on Friendster (and Beverage Digest, but that’s another story). In fact, in researching this post, I found a hilarious IM conversation on April 7, 2004 with my good friend Liz Enthusiasm, of the band Freezepop, where she talks about how she just signed up for MySpace that day, and it’s “so much better than friendster.”
As we mentioned before, I Love Bees, the seminal ARG launched in 2004 as well. And, again, Digg – the traffic-moving powerhouse wunderkind of the Web 2.0 era – launched in November of that year.
Already by the time we launched the chicken, Friendster was going gangbusters and Myspace had already launched. As an aside, we made a fakester page on Friendster for the Chicken, but it didn’t take. The chicken conquered viral marketing. Social marketing? Not so much.
Perhaps most relevantly, in November of the next year a little-known site called YouTube would launch that would change the face of digital advertising once again.
In September of 2006, a company called Facebook would open the doors to the public on its massively popular social network.
And in early 2007, a startup called Twitter launched.
What I’ve come to realize is that online advertising is in a constant state of improvement and change. Sometimes when I talk to bankers or financial people I’ll have to explain to them that unlike in other industries, there is a watershed event in online marketing every single year that requires a good online marketer to change their ways, learn new things, or develop new capabilities.
There are a million tools, and a million theories behind each tool. The Chicken proved the viability of one of these tools – viral marketing – much like Dove Evolution proved the viability of the Viral Video.
Crispin’s managing director of content Jeff Steinhour says that the chicken “feels like old hat. There is a race to find what’s next12.” He is absolutely right. I recently echoed the same thing at a Facebook panel during advertising week. Some tools are still looking for their case study.
The human angle
Then there’s the human angle, having been part of something like this. Mike Rubenstein said today when we were chatting about it:
I knew it was awesome and figured people would like it, but once we started hearing about just how much people liked it, I think my brain just took a little bit to catch up. One of those projects where it starts to sink in when your family’s seen it or friends start to send it to you. – Mike Rubenstein
It is weird to be a part of something this big, I think, for all of us. I have a few friends in popular rock bands, and sometimes when I watch them hem and haw when asked what they do, I blurt out what it is they do – I believe this is part of being a friend, to get them past the awkwardness of having to say “I’m a rock star.” And the eyes of the person they’re talking to light up. It’s like that with the chicken. Both us and Crispin still use it in most of our presentation decks – we’d all be fools not to.
It’s a surreal privilege to have been part of it, and stranger still that it’s been five years.
In that original Livejournal post, I wrote in the comments, as I grasped the popularity of this, that it was going to be on my Tombstone. I still feel that way, sometimes, though it’s less overwhelming now, five years in, with the other successes we’ve had through the years.
Time marches on
Both shops involved are doing just dandy, of course. Crispin’s been lauded a million times, earned countless agency-of-the-year awards in both traditional and digital marketing. We did a few other projects together back in the day. My little job tracking app tells me we did a total of 10 projects in our time together. There was work for Ikea, Virgin (which also won us all a bunch of Cannes Lions), Mini and Method, which netted us another Grand Prix at Cannes. We even did another project together for Burger King – the Angus Diet, which I was quite fond of during the day. Not as big of a hit, though, like I’ve always said – viral marketing is a tool in the arsenal. Something you do as part of a portfolio of endeavors. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
And we, of course. We’re doing all right as well. Hobnobbing with Crispin up there in the top 50 most innovative companies on Fast Company magazine. (sorry I couldn’t resist. That one’s too exciting). They’re six points ahead of us, but there’s still another year.
I kid, I kid. People make a bigger thing of our parting of ways than there really was. Both companies are smart and ambitious and are plowing forth into no man’s land when it comes to branding in the digital age. Our time working closely together lasted a few years, but as more and more production shops came along, and our prices went up as we grew and our capabilities expanded, it was only natural we all moved on.
The chicken, for both of us, allowed us to pitch new and exciting things to clients. It gave us a bit of a calling card, of course, but also established trust and credibility with clients. Crispin was in a better place to capitalize on that, but I am thankful we (and especially Eva, who parlayed the chicken into some great PR victories) took or moment in the sun and ran with it, growing the company away from being perceived as just a production shop. We’d had some notice and respect prior to this, but this was a great door opener. And for that, we’ll be forever thankful.
The Players – Where Are They Now?
One of the thing that’s been interesting to me is how many of us are still at TBG and Crispin. There’s a lot of turnover in this industry, but a lot of us seem to have stayed put. Jeff and his ECD Alex Bogusky and CD Rob Reilly are all still at Crispin, of course, as is Jordan Kilpatrick13, the man whose name is still on the domain registration. He’s now VP of IT at Crispin. So far as I can tell copywriter Bob Cianfrone’s still there as well, as is producer Terry Stavoe. Mark Taylor, the art director, has gone on to GSD&M, and Rob Tripas, who was our day-to-day producer and main contact along with Jeff, is at Leo Burnett now as an SVP of Emerging Media.
Over here, Benjamin, myself, and Mike Rubenstein are still Barbarians, as are Eva and Kevin. Barbarian producer Jennifer Iwanicki has started her own shop with her husband Tim Brunelle called Hello Viking in Minneapolis. Barbarian tech director Aubrey Anderson’s set up shop in SF with a company called Particle.
As for the chicken himself? Well, costume creator and hollywood legend Stan Winston himself passed on in 2008, and the actor and the actor’s stand-in from Stan Winston are lost to the sands of time, I think.
And so, happy birthday, chicken
So there it is. We love you, little guy. I hope your kindergarten teacher is as good as Mrs. Belsky. She was pretty great. I hope you learn new things. Like to not fight with others. Or to jump your motorbike. I hope you’ve taken all your MAD ROYALTIES and retired to some tropical island. That must be what happened, right? Because we haven’t seen you in a while. If you go tropical, though, be careful of termites! Your beak is wooden. Also, I hear @msprovacateur has a special on garters if you need some new ones. Peace.
Footnotes
- Much has been made of the price we got for building the chicken, but I think it’s all just a tempest in a teapot. The vast majority of our jobs are priced the same way to this day, and indeed, in many ways, our pricing was forward-looking. We simply looked at the team size, looked at the ridiculously short amount of time we had, and billed for the hours. Then we billed for the extra hours as things went longer. That part went over about as well then that it does now.
- I’m 100% sure, now, knowing what I do about advertising agencies, that this time did not just materialize. I’m sure Crispin cleverly worked the schedules to give everyone more time to get it right.
- I am amazed that I was up and at work that early back then.
- I’ve unlocked the post again now. It’s a fascinating read into us updating the commands as people found mistakes and made suggestions.
- This was a bit surprising to me, but I checked it out, and sure enough, Digg launched in November 2004. Which makes it doubly hilarious that the Subservient Chicken has all of 9 Diggs.
- Roger Pe, BusinessWorld, July 9, 2004, “Asians Shine in Advertising Festival”, p. 27
- Incidentally, the Barbarian Group wikipedia page could use a little work. Just sayin’.
- This is a whole long aside, but I found it insane at the time that so many people kept calling up asking for a subservient this-or-that. It seemed so blatantly robbing. It’s as if they thought we invented a new technology, like the pop under or something. BUT NOW, I am rethinking this, in light of some of Brian Morrissey’s recent comments around the Skittles campaign, and how we need to stop thinking of every idea as unique and start thinking of them as discovering tools. There will be a time that
pulling a subservient chicken” will be a genius move. - Another long aside – every time Agencyspy mentions us or the Subservient Chicken, someone comments that the Virtual Bartender was first. I’ve refuted their claim and identified a November 2004 launch date for Virtual Bartender but it seems to keep cropping up. I’m thinking now, actually, that the misunderstanding probably has something to do with the aforementioned november launch of Digg, on which the Virtual Bartender was a huge hit, if I recall, whereas, as I said, we only got nine Diggs.
- Though the economist in me still grumbles that the numbers aren’t normalized for web traffic growth, etc.
- Scott Johnson, Adweek, July 10, 2006, “BK Redux: Fool’s Errand.”
- Eleftheria Parpis, Adweek, January 5, 2009, “US AOY: Crispin Porter + Bogusky”
- I can’t resist this one jibe that the first Google link for “Jordan Kilpatrick Crispin” on Google is this great quote of his from the Wall Street Journal about how happy they are to have switched to Macs. Har har.
29 comments
I'm very interested in the process of creativity and I love the fact that you shared this with all of us. It really says a lot about you guys.
Thanks you.
My favourite bit of the Urban Dictionary page is the update (definition 3), posted only 6 weeks later: "Note: The above definition is old. I do not like Nikita anymore - not even as a friend!".
I'm a little confused, though, as to your logic. I agree with you the idea of the chicken came from one place (well, assuming you can call all of crispin one place), and the website from two (us and them). I don't quite fathom how you could think that we didn't have a hand in figuring out things like keyword search, frame rate, web-like, blending the scenes together, etc. Why would they hire us if they had all that figured out? Why wouldn't they just hire a freelancer?
It's also probably worth nothing that we've already made our money. Off of this idea, and many others. And you may want to look around at our site and see that we have not been sitting idly resting on our laurels.
I went to great lengths in this article to not claim all the credit, to mention everyone I was aware of working on the project, and to not bad mouth anyone. It's sad that you want to turn this into some sort of argument. if you were there, share your memories with the public! And if you weren't, well, then, forgive me for trying to share our memories.
Sean
I remember this being the most cowboy kind of project we ever did with an agency. Jeff and i worked that shit out pretty damn fast and loose, and everyone that was involved was just UP FOR IT. It was one of the most fun projects I've worked on, because it basically came out exactly how we wanted it to, and it was pretty great all around.
In the end it was also sort of a dangerous project because next everyone wanted something as adventurous, but half the adventure was that there was such a tiny team, and most everyone peripheral that usually ruins the nuances of a project had no idea exactly what we were doing until it launched, so it was like a perfect storm of adventure and under the radar. Now you need to explain yourself before you do any little thing sometimes which can stifle things if you want some new shit.
This is the perfect time to share this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/secretbenjamin/sets/72157616388097113/ which nobody's seen if you havent been in my nyc office in the last 2 months. I found this toy in brooklyn - its just like a fancy kidrobot style vinyl toy, seemingly from 2005, definitely not BK authorized. nicely made, and despite what you think from the box cover it is non-electronic, just like an action figure. From an ad campaign website.
Fact: this is the only website i ever beta-tested on my mom before we launched.
we tested this shit with EVERYONE. we shot like 400 clips that day, but we had like twenty five thousand keywords, and i think the thing we got best here was that when it worked it was scary accurate, and it worked most of the time. getting the human element in here, we went super overboard on that, which i think was what made it real magic, vs. just weird. This is the biggest lesson anyone can take away from this project - find the key thing about your idea that is interesting, and take it WAY TOO FUCKING FAR.
Take it so far that your audience thinks that nobody would bother taking that thing so far, and then they will think its magic, or impressive, or at least significant. Advertising should seem like it was hard, and I am proud that we worked so hard on putting such a smart engine behind such a filthy chicken
ok thanks!
Back then?? :)
Man, I'm gonna go eat a chicken sandwich RIGHT NOW.
I then read in Adweek that it was Crispin and TBG that developed this idea. And in truth I had not heard of either agency at that point. I thought to myself, brilliant work. Everyone did. Both companies are now famous. They both deserve it.
I am very fortunate to now be the president and a partner at The Barbarian Group. In the last five years we have developed and produced hundreds of great marketing ideas for agencies and clients of all shapes and sizes. Crispin has as well. Awesome. That’s the way this business is supposed to work. Do something great, and you get noticed. Keep doing great things, and you become successful.
I really liked my partner Rick’s detailed post about how the Subservient Chicken micro-site came to be. It’s an excellent study of the origin of a great idea. It’s not about credit or a claim or correcting the past, not at all. It’s a celebration of one of the great online marketing ideas. Let’s all go make some more.
Hey!
That's a really good question. There are two other parties that are worth mentioning. VML, who was BK's interactive agency at the time. They were kept aware of the thing the whole time, and were definitely involved, though that was mainly through Crispin, so I don't have tons of details. The actual programming of the .swf wasn't done by them, but the config file was highly editable and I'm sure CPB had as many people as possible working on that, though I dont' know the details.
Additionally, VML and Rackspace definitely helped out as CPB transitioned the site away from internal servers to a proper hosted environment. VML managed BK's relationship with Rackspace, and everyone @ both parties busted their butts getting the site moved to a proper, stable server, out of the blue, as the traffic spiked uncontrollably. We were involved with this to some extant through Jordan, as mentioned above, but not tons. I do know, though, that both parties helped a lot getting it to a stable server. This process started about 72 hours after launch.
ALSO - I should add, CPB bought and paid for the files. They, and other parties, I'M SURE, did stuff after the fact. I'd not be surprised at all if there were some optimization enhancements, etc., as the files migrated and the site exploded.
BTW - I loved the chicken - nice work.
it really does not failed to