Online Spin: But Will It Sell Chicken?

Tom Hespos wonders whether or not Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" viral effort is really going to sell food, seeming to disregard the benefit of increasing BK mindshare. As media people seem to spend their lives making up new techniques and metrics to prevent clients from understanding whether their campaigns worked, it's not entirely fair to hold this poor chicken to such high scrutiny. Maybe the viral campaigns threaten to online media folk? After all, they do highlight the reality that the Internet is a search and communication medium, and not the broadcast medium that many planners would like it to be.

All of that said, viral marketing campaigns do need to have some purpose beyond simply creating noise. DMC, a former employer, used to judge all viral ideas against a number of strict criteria including:
- Relevance to the brand
- Relevance to the overall campaign
- Entertainment value
- Distributability (how easy would it be to get the content on main viral/entertainment sites)
- Spreadability (would the content spread to other sites)
- P2P (would people be motivated to pass the content on?)
- Receiver experience (what was the experience like of receiving the content from a friend)
- PRability (how easy would it be to get the campaign to extend into mainstream media)
- and other stuff.

Scrutinised against these criteria I'd say that the chicken does pretty well. OK, not perfectly, but a lot better than much of the creative drivel that seeps out of digital agencies today.

Other recent viral campaign coverage:
- BK Spreads Viral Chicken
- Wired: BK's Chicken Effort a Porn Takeoff
- Ford Keeps Sportka Controversy Alive
- Ford Uses Movie Spoof to Promote Sportka
- Ford’s ‘Unapproved’ Ad to Backfire
- Amazing Honda Ad
- Honda Cog Ad Parody