Like all good Internet phenomena, Subservient Chicken took off literally overnight. By the end of January, nine months after its release, the site had scored well over 385 million hits and was still getting 250,000 to 500,000 hits per day. "I guarantee they'll take home some awards for Subservient Chicken this year," says Joan Minihan Reilly, the associate director of the Advertising Club of New York, which hosts the International Andy awards this month for creativity in advertising. Awards are nice, but results are even nicer. As Andy Bonaparte, a Burger King ad director, bragged to Adweek in October, the site helped "sell a lot, a lot, a lot of chicken sandwiches."
For his part, Bogusky worries that the chicken will get stale. "I'm sick of that damn chicken," he says. "But the site's still so popular, we can't take it down without causing an uproar."
The chicken isn't the only thing that risks going stale. There's nothing like gaining a reputation as a red-hot creative shop for turning up the pressure in a business where you're only as good as your last ad. And aside from a brief dustup caused by Burger King's paid inclusion in the premiere of The Apprentice's latest season (which the agency says was all Burger King's doing), nothing churned out since Subservient Chicken has turned many heads: not a much-touted "Chicken Fight" series of ads that ultimately petered out, and not a bland SpongeBob movie tie-in. People did talk about a series of spots called "Wake Up With the King," in which a costumed king rolled over to hand a breakfast sandwich to a surprised sleeper. But most comments focused on how creepy the king looked.
Now, as Keller and Bogusky's team wraps up the final details of the Fantasy Ranch spots (they finally settled on Darius Rucker, the lead singer for Hootie and the Blowfish, to replace Dolly), a new challenge lies ahead in coming up with something that will hit for July. Last summer, the agency easily drove traffic to Burger King outlets thanks to a Spiderman movie tie-in. This year, there's no big movie, no new product. Nothing. Yet Burger King is obviously going to want to see traffic and sales continue to climb.
The agency's principals don't seem to spend much time worrying about losing the account. After all, they're well aware that Burger King has had five agencies since 2000. "We've got to be the ninja: Accept death before going into battle," Steinhour says. "You have to be like that if you're going to give it everything you've got for a client." Klein, Burger King's marketing honcho, insists that the relationship with CP+B remains solid and extends beyond a month-to-month accounting of individual campaigns. "What they helped us do was sharpen and clarify what our brand means," he says.
That, he says, is worth more than any single campaign, even if it happens to be Subservient Chicken.
Ryan Underwood is a Fast Company staff writer.
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