Ruling The Roost

"Virgin is a brand that likes to push the edge," Rossi says. "Even so, I would never have given the green light for the LodgeNet piece if the agency didn't have the strategic thinking and research to back it up." Instead of pushing the creative genius of the idea, CP+B came to the briefing on the LodgeNet piece armed with reams of data showing that executive types who would most likely fly business class pay especially close attention during pay-per-view shows in their hotel rooms (they're paying for them, after all). In the end, the total cost of Virgin's "Suite and Innocent" spot came in at less than $1 million. That's "a lot of bang for the buck," Rossi says.

Burger King's Klein echoes Rossi's sentiment. "All of CP+B's work is driven by a strategic purpose," he says. "Nothing is done solely for creativity's sake." In reviving "Have It Your Way," CP+B hoped to capitalize on the notion of mass customization, an idea popularized by B. Joseph Pine and Stan Davis in the 1990s, as a competitive weapon against McDonald's merely Brobdingnagian "We serve billions" approach. Instead of trying futilely to convince people that one burger or one fry is better than another, something like Subservient Chicken -- the idea of having your way with a chicken in bondage -- expresses the brand's custom-made approach in a cheeky way that connects deeply with Burger King's target demographic. Or at least it connects much more so than Burger King's previous agency, giant Young & Rubicam (released after only 10 months), did with its "Fire's Ready" campaign, which played up the grill.

Create An Idea Culture

Ideas are an almost unhealthy obsession at CP+B: They interrupt marriages, they limit social interaction, they disturb sleep. And if there is a dirty secret lurking beneath the warm and fuzzy surface of CP+B's culture, it's that non-idea-producers are quickly chewed up and spit out of the organization. "If you can't come up with ideas, you won't survive here for long," says Bogusky, flashing a rare hint of intensity. Conversely, people who are true idea machines (from any discipline) find a welcome home within CP+B's concrete and steel walls.

One such idea superstar is Jeff Benjamin, the agency's interactive director. Recruited from San Francisco ad firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners a year and a half ago, Benjamin was almost immediately charged with developing a Web element that would go along with a series of television spots that were being dreamed up for the Subservient Chicken campaign.

In fact, the whole Subservient Chicken idea -- putting an almost seedy, slightly creepy but very funny twist on the idea of "Have It Your Way" -- typifies the virtue of operating within an idea culture. It's the dogged pursuit of originality within the agency that produces these twists on ideas, which are what make CP+B's ads "sticky," as Bogusky puts it.

"Even if another agency had thought to bring back the 'Have It Your Way' slogan, it probably would have just replayed the original Burger King song from 30 years ago and shot some spots around that," says Pete Favat, executive creative director for Boston-based ad shop Arnold Worldwide. "They are like pitbulls when it comes to finding creative ways to deliver a message: They work and work on something until they know they've got it right."

With plans in place to stage a couple of days' worth of hot chicken Webcam action to go along with the Subservient Chicken spots, Benjamin wanted more. Then he got an idea (surprise!). If he were able to come up with an exhaustive list of commands that the film crew could shoot the chicken performing, maybe he could create a site where the chicken would simultaneously carry out millions of demands in real time. Burger King never pushed him or the agency to do this. He just thought it was cool. "Our approach has always been, 'Follow the work,' " says account-services director and partner Jeff Steinhour, meaning if ever you're in doubt about a decision, simply ask whether it's going to make the work better.

Suddenly, the situation became a no-brainer. The film crew grabbed a friend's apartment in L.A. and shot the chicken doing 200 different actions while Benjamin set to work on the Web site's functionality. Even before it was finished, everyone in the agency knew they had a barn burner on their hands. When the site neared completion, Benjamin emailed the URL to several people within CP+B asking them to send the link out to friends to test. From that single email Benjamin sent on the morning of April 8 last year, without a peep of promotion, the Subservient Chicken site ended the day with 1 million total hits.