Subservient Chicken

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.

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

moonwalk
Throw Pillow
Riverdance or Irish dance
The “elephant”
Bowl
Tango
Show teeth
Be an airplane
Shake your booty
The Robot
Lay egg
Walk Like an Egyptian
Yoga
Sleep
Rage
Raise the roof
Dog
Fall
Can I eat you?
Squat
Peck Ground
Travolta
Fight
Roshambo
Read a book from his bookcase.
Have a drink of water
Blow your nose
Barrel roll
Begone or go away
Turn off the lights
Jump rope
Hide behind sofa
Golf Swing
Try to do a headstand
Hide
Leave
Sit
Watch TV
Pick your nose & eat it
Spin
Do the YMCA
Fly
Handstand
Hula hoop
Cartwheel
Push-up
Electric Slide
Air Guitar
Tap Dance
Referee
Bowl
Poke your eye out
3 point stance
Paint
Throw a Football
Backflip
Turn off the lights
Sing
Die
Pee on the couch
Pee in the corner
Pee like a dog
Do the splits
headbang
Pray
Shakespeare
Headbutt
March like a German Soldier
Swim
Kick an imaginary soccer ball.
Jump
Act like a dog
Puke
Fart
Hug
Cabbage Patch
Tai Chi
Hula
Ballet
Breakdance
Make a sandwich
Playboy
Be a monkey
Macarana (note spelling)
Kiss
Go to sleep
Flap around
Be a duck
Do the silly walk

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.

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]