You’ve likely seen this a thousand times already. Really, that’s not enough.

Watch it again.

Sing along.

(This work was produced by Jennifer Iwanicki at The Barbarian Group for Burger King and Crispin Porter Bogusky.)

SubservientChicken.com was created to promote a new chicken sandwich to men and women, ages 16-30. The site reached over 1 million visitors in its first 24 hours—and over 100 million visitors since then—a testament to its viral strength. The key to its success:  A simple, relevant user experience, backed up by a highly complex, yet efficient production. 

As the Director of Production at The Barbarian Group (2004-2006), Jennifer oversaw the launch of SubservientChicken.com as well as numerous other campaigns. The site encourages users to literally “Have It Your Way” by allowing them to interact with a person in a chicken suit. Just type in any command—jump, dance, stand on one leg, build a fort, etc—and the chicken will do it. In other words, you, “Have it your way.” This simple idea and its intuitive presentation became addictive and contagious.

Millions of people spent hours on the site, attempting to stump the chicken. They thought it might be real—a live web cam, perhaps. Thousands of people blogged about Subservient Chicken, and millions emailed their friends, helping spread the word further and faster than any campaign site before.

So how did the site actually work? After the core idea and site design were developed, we focused on an initial list of several hundred “commands,” e.g. potential requests we thought people would ask the chicken to do. Then we filmed 400+ sequences with an actor in a chicken suit in a Los Angeles hotel room. Each sequence was edited and tagged with the relevant commands—including new ones we continued to think up during production. In other words, there might be just a few, or dozens of keywords/commands associated with each individual video sequence. After the site launched, we tracked new commands submitted by site users that we hadn’t considered, and tagged them to relevant video clips.

Now some video clips have 100+ commands associated with them. The algorithm continues to evolve as more users interact with the site.