BK Launches Umpteenth Chicken Site

Question: How many chicken-themed microsites sites can an agency produce for a single client? Answer: As many as it huckin’ well pleases.

Just as it did with Coq Roq, the Whopperettes, the Angus Diet and of course Subservient Chicken, Crispin Porter + Bogusky has launched yet another self-contained video experience for Burger King. And like those sites, this one comes complete with sexual undertones, tongue-in-cheek parody and clever interactive design elements.

The theme of the new site, at HuckinChicken.com, is motorbikes, and in particular motorbike stunts. A series of videos depicts a man in a chicken suit (what else?) performing various feats on his bike, including everything from donuts to wheelies to jumps.

The number of stunts visible on the site corresponds to the number of visits it has received. As more people navigate to the URL, the stunts become more numerous –- as well as more dangerous. The tactic encourages visitors to tell friends about the site, so the danger level of stunts gets elevated. It also encourages users to return later to see more mayhem.

A red thermometer of a type commonly used in church fundraisers tracks the number of visits the page has received. It shows how many stunts have been displayed and how many remain to be seen. At the time of this writing, the site counter had tracked just over 1,000 hits, resulting in the display of four stunt videos, including one showing a mid-air split. The utmost stunt on the page, tantalizingly labeled “World Record,” will be displayed when the tally of site visitors reaches one million.

Each video is accompanied by a theme song, in which the words “Big Huckin’ Chicken” are sung in a deliberately overdone fashion that seems to parody other feel-good commercials. In addition to sounding suspiciously like the F-bomb, the word huckin’ is a biking, skating and skiing term that means, according to one Web definition, “to throw yourself off of something, an enthusiastic drop.”