Why Subservient Chickent put a four year hiatus on social marketing

We’ve all seen it.  We’ve all seen the awards, the praise, the articles in Media Post, Advertising Age, etc.  Heck, it even garnered its own wikipedia page.  And Crispin has been riding a high ever since.

Who is this ‘we’ I’m talking about?  Hm, well, it’s not my wife, she hasn’t heard of it.  It certainly wasn’t my dentist when I asked him.  Nor the various family members I asked over the holiday breaks.

I suppose ‘we’ in this sense is agency folk.  Well, no worries if only that tiny sliver of people have heard of the campaign.  It was HUGELY successful.  Major ROI on that campaign.  Sold a lot of hamburgers…right?

Just look at this award submission page that Crispin put up.  This thing was a HUGE success!  Over 450 million hits to the website!  More than 7,000,000 broadcast impressions!  And the site says, “a significant increase in chicken sales directly linked to the success of the site”.  Huh?  No gaudy numbers of how much sales increased?

Now, granted, I’m not the first to question the real success of this campaign.  But I’m contending that this campaign has actually hurt the progression of social media and viral marketing and it’s taken us almost four years to overcome it since its inception in April of ’04.

Here’s what happened.  Back when this campaign came out, the world wasn’t sure what social marketing, viral video, or any of this ’emerging channel’ stuff was all about.  So this campaign came out and blew everyone away, myself included.  The campaign was amazingly creative and honestly, it was cool as hell.  A dude in a chicken costume that would do whatever you told him to via a website?  Brilliant.

But it was never measured against direct sales.  It was measured against hype, which predominantly was us talking to ourselves (the ‘we’ I spoke of earlier).

Our industry has only just now started to understand that the true power of digital marketing is when it intertwines effectively with direct marketing – i.e. it actually drives sales and is measured accordingly.  Our own chairman, Stan Rapp, recently moderated a panel at Advertising Week entitled, “What You Need to Know About Direct + Digital = EXPONENTIAL GROWTH“.  Why these two areas of marketing have largely worked independently of each other for so long is amazing to me.

So for the past four years, marketers have tried to emulate what the subservient chicken accomplished.  Impressions.  Check.  Industry praise.  Check.  ‘Viralability’.  Check.  Sales?  Not hardly.

And agencies, always far too focused on keeping up with the other agencies, have been pushing these types of campaigns harder than the TV networks have been pushing reality TV ever since the first Survivor and Real Life’s came out (I mean seriously, have you heard of this new show, “Hole in a Wall“, where people have to…jump through a hole in a wall?  Seriously, you know there was a focus group that thought this show was a good idea.  I want to sell products to THOSE PEOPLE).  And hey, awards and recognition win new accounts, right?

How do we overcome this?  Well, I think its starting to happen naturally due to this economy (yes, this economy actually has some positive elements).  Because marketers are being forced to measure the direct success of their efforts and defend their budgets, they are working hard to tie direct sales to their campaigns.  This is a good thing (for agencies that understand the direct + digital mentality).

So we’re naturally on our way to overcoming this ‘subservient effect’.

What else?  Well, how about all the award groups make direct sales a major, if not the only, criteria they analyze to determine the winners?  And marketers, how about forcing your agencies to give you direct KPI’s that tie to sales (key performance indicators) on all the campaigns they run?

In the end, its not Crispin’s fault that they put a four year hiatus on social marketing’s progress.  They just created a really cool, highly praised campaign back in 2004.  It’s all of our faults for never asking the real question, “So what did this actually do to sell burgers”?