Burger King says Web chicken won’t go mainstream… that is to say, more mainstream than a news article on yahoo.com 
Many of us that spend too long on the internet participating in the navel gazing that can be blogging and email listservs have heard about the subservient chicken. As it turns out it was an underground campaign to promote some burger king chicken sandwiches. This was an entirely unbranded campaign, more of a buzz builder until it started slowly leaking that it was really burger king pushing chicken products.
I think this kind of marketing can actually form a bond between the company and the market that “gets it”. I think as companies start to get it we’ll end up with more of these socially engineered campaigns. You know what, I heard that disney dressed this fat guy in a tron costume to promote tron 2.0
I like the exclusive nature of this kind of campagn, it appeals to my english pentient for irony, as irony has been charicterized as sarcasm that not everyone gets, but when you do get it you are part of the club. As the economist puts it “A quiet joke at your expense”
It’s a somewhat similar story to the Ford Ka ad that went around the same channels recently. It showed the cat getting decapitated by the sunroof. The ad is at http://www.apqx89.dsl.pipex.com/Cat.mpg and there are various stories around about it - supposedly it wasn’t intended to get out and Ford has tried to distance itself from it since they didn’t approve it and it’s generated a lot of anger from pet lovers, blah blah blah.
I don’t know that Ford or their agency (O+M) is really clever enough to create a truly underground campaign by disavowing something they knowingly leaked, but it’s possible.
The evil twin, that is great, i love it, it certainly appeals to my british sense of humor
Reminds me of the feel great ad (unfortunatly ofline) that was done as a pitch for nutrigrain bars, I think it was done as a promo for the ad company. Belongs in zeldmans ad graveyard