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2004·Early web, before YouTube·unexpected

The Subservient Chicken

The website that taught advertising the internet was not a place to put a television commercial.

From the early web

This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on subservientchicken.com.

The story

What this was

A other classified under farm-animals.

It first appeared in 2004, during early web, before YouTube.

It is the origin point of viral marketing as a discipline. Before it, a brand's website was a brochure; the Subservient Chicken was a toy that people forwarded because playing with it was the joke, and the product was almost incidental. Every branded microsite, interactive stunt and "experience" of the following decade descends from it.

Burger King kept the character for a decade of follow-up campaigns and brought him back for a tenth-anniversary film in 2014. The site itself is long gone, taking its clip library with it — the form it invented outlived the thing.

You were there

More from 2004

The same internet

Early web, before YouTube

More like this

Related

Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on subservientchicken.com.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A other classified under farm-animals.
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