online_advertising_critique

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//Pick two instances of an existing online advertising/marketing campaign and critique their design and approach. Who is their target audience? What are they trying to advance? When did you see this campaign, and where? What techniques did they use? Do you believe they were effective? Why/why not?//=====

= = =Subservient Chicken=

====Burger King has recently launched an online advertising campaign to promote their current slogan "HAVE IT YOUR WAY". The most notable ad from this campaign is Burger King's interactive video entitled "Subservient Chicken" on its U.S. website. This interactive video features a person in a chicken suit standing in the middle of a living room, staring at the viewer. Below the video is a text bar which allows the audience to type in a command and click submit, which will subsequently cause the chicken in question to perform the acts that are being typed in a surprising accurate function (as you can tell from the command typed and the chicken's response).====



====This online advertising campaign seemingly targets the youth and more media-savvy people to go on Burger King's website and explore its menus using a tactic that is both bizarre and interesting. The play-on-words of their slogan "HAVE IT YOUR WAY" and the Subservient Chicken's ability to allow the user to type in a command and have the chicken any way the user wants draws a very thin line between appetizing and grotesque. The Chicken costume appears to look very strange and scary, and this may even repel some to eating chicken from Burger King.====

====I first saw this campaign in my CCT312 Interactive Storytelling class, and at that point I did not believe this campaign was effective at all in getting people to eat their chicken options, but I do feel that "Subservient Chicken" is successful in terms of creating traffic and hype to its website and brand.====

Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" - []

=The Fun Theory=

====The Fun Theory is an initiative of Volkswagen to create an online advertising campaign that seeks to change the world for the better. This group finds mundane tasks of daily life and attempts to put the "fun" into doing these tasks, in order to show the world that people are capable of doing good things (recycling, exercising, driving slowly, etc.) if there is some sort of a reward or an emotional response attached to these tasks.====

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====The "Bottle Bank Arcade Machine" is one of the experiments that The Fun Theory has done. Before creating this experiment, the people at The Fun Theory observed that many consumers tend to recycle plastic bottles and cans, but tend to avoid recycling glass. hence, a machine was created to emulate an arcade that included high scores and coin dropping noises whenever someone recycled a glass. The result of this experiment, as shown in the video above, was used by over a hundred people in one day, where another conventional bottle dispenser collected only two bottles.====

====Aside from creating projects of their own, they also encourage people to come up with ideas that can help improve human life and change the world for the better. Entries with realistic ideas that sends a positive message has a chance of making their concept come true, with the help of The Fun Theory:====

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The above project is the winning idea of the fun theory award. This is a great example of an online advertising campaign engaging its audience since they are able to incorporate their own ideas and find ways to get involved in the campaign, turning this campaign from a closed group to the wide audience to a wide audience sharing their own ideas.

I find that The Fun Theory have created a very successful advertising campaign, due to the fact that they are able to engage people in such a way that makes them want to change for the better, as well as making people realize that they are all capable of doing great things - we all just need a little bit of a push at times.

The Fun Theory - []