One night a year ago I stumbled upon Subservient Chicken, Burger King's attempt at "new" interactive advertising. I imagine, had I found myself on this website by myself in my room I might have stayed there a minute or less. But, I was in my living room with the guys I live with. All five of them. When I started typing things in, one of them noticed that there was a chicken jumping and dancing on my screen, and one of them led to another, and another led to us spending 30 minutes with the site. We tested everything we could. Asking the chicken something about golf resulted in him swinging an air club. Asking him to do something....inappropriate would result in him walking to the camera and shaking his "finger" at us. That happened pretty often. In itself, this event was not unusual. We often find funny or unusual websites or videos and show them to each other.

I cannot, however, remember another time when we've shared an advertisement in this way. When we watch television with each other we'll laugh at some of the ads, but it's never a focus like the Subservient Chicken occurrence. So, this was an interesting happening, because we were subject to media that was being used to sell us something, but at the same time we were enjoying ourselves and mostly overlooking the fact that it was related to a product. I think, though, that a similar happening in our house helps to explain this.

In the fall, we decided to switch our tv provider from Comcast to AT&T because we'd heard that they were competitively priced and weren't as horrendous at customer service as we'd experienced with Comcast. It worked out that we got a Tivo-like DVR included included in our package, and thus began our ability to record whatever we wanted whenever. When we were at a rehearsal for hockey band and we'd miss The Office, we could record it. When we were going to an away game or some other sporting event that would be televised, we'd even redord that--just in case we were on tv. After the space/time conflict we'd come home and watch the recording at our leisure, when we wanted--very convenient. We even made a night of catching up on our recordings sometimes. As we sat on the couches, joking around, it became a running joke that whoever had the remote was to face the most scrutiny in our making fun of people that night.

The remote-holder would start the recording of the Office for instance, and we'd watch the first segment of the show. But when the commercials came we'd inevitably start obnoxiously yelling and prodding the person with the remote to skip the commercials. Because we could. And, just as inevitably as commercials and us yelling, the fast forwarding would always go too far and they'd run into the next segment past the beginning. This of course resulted in more yelling and joking. Of course, we give no thought to what we're really doing here.

In reality, we're purposely avoiding the reason that most of our shows exist in a way--advertising. Our new power is certainly part of the reason for Subservient Chicken-like advertisements. Yes, it's a little weird. And for the most part it's not that noticable that it's an ad. Some might see this as a failure in itself, but the more it seems to be an ad the more likely I am to skip it, just like commercials. Some examples do this better than others, and I think Burger King could perhaps use a bit more product in their ad to really make me think about their brand, but it does do a decent job holding attention.

With just enough mystery behind what the ad's actual purpose is, I'll check it out, for a bit at least. Maybe that makes me the chicken...