As the bubble burst in 2001, advertising fell across all sectors. By 2003 television had regained momentum while online revenue continued to climb. But as the newspaper industry and trade publications continued to struggle it was becoming evident that the media landscape was changing.
For nearly four decades, the most effective way to create awareness about a product was to pour sums of money into television, print and radio advertisements. But in the 2000s consumer habits changed, cell phones, personal computers and the Internet became an essential part of people’s lives, and it changed the way people communicated all over the world.
Advertising agencies were forced to think of different ways to communicate with consumers. As a result, agencies began to rethink what media was, which inspired the advertising agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky to adapt the belief that “everything is media”. The belief is that there is no preset media mold into which ideas can be poured. Which means agencies were not only tasked with coming up with creative messages to promote a product but also inventing a new vehicle to carry those messages.
In search of new mediums, agencies adapted a new style of advertising known as “guerilla marketing” where ads took new forms including guerilla stunts, live events, original art, video games and interactive websites. This made it possible for brands to build momentum at a grass-roots level without spending huge sums of money.
One of the most successful ads to come out of this (though some wouldn’t call it an ad) was a website called the Subservient Chicken. CP & B created the website in 2004 on behalf of Burger King to help promote the company’s latest chicken offering. The website featured a video of a man in a chicken costume standing in a living room who would do anything you asked by simply typing a command on your computer keyboard.
People began to share the site with their friends and soon there were millions of people across the country laughing at this man in a chicken suit performing their every command.
While a television spot generally tries to hold peoples’ attention for 15-30 seconds, the people who visited subservientchicken.com spent an average of seven minutes on a site that cost about $50,000 to make.
In 2004, 13 million people visited the site, mostly by word of mouth. This phenomenon changed the face of advertising and made CP & B one of the most recognizable agencies in the world. CP & B became the modern benchmark for success and inspired agencies around the world to try to imitate their work as well as their agency model.