The Century Times

Some three years back, Burger King, a big fast food chain in U.S.A. launched a flash based interactive website to promote its newly launched TenderCrisp Chicken Sandwich & subsequently Spicy TenderCrisp Chicken Sandwich. The website was an instant hit due to its unique creativity and interactivity with the element of little porn and humour. It got around a million hits within 24 hours of its launch and around 15 million hits in the following week. The site’s technology allowed users to type in nearly anything and get a response from the chicken. This viral campaign infact won the Gold in Viral Awards a year after.

All’s well till this way. But did the campaign actually result in the increased sales of its TenderCrisp Chicken Sandwich??? Well, the product is doing well than earlier, but there isn’t any indication of any metoric rise in the sales or brand value as was evident from the web - traffic it received!

But despite of it, the creativity of that campaign invited other imitators to do the same for them. Last year Microsoft launched a similar website with the help of 352 Media Group to design, film, and produce an application that used a combination of video, XML, Atlas, and other emerging technologies designed to create a viral buzz within Microsoft’s target audience. The end task was to promote Microsoft’s developer tools. Therefore It uses WMV instead of Flash. There is the Visual Studio poster and the Windows desktop wallpaper.

But despite of its excellent interface and video strips, the website garnered only 35,000 hits in its first month. But it started picking up with time and in its seventh month this website received over 2.2 million distinct page views! But will it serve its end goal with the equal efficiency. I am skeptical about it.

Just forget all the above marketing analysis and lets indulge a bit in playing with this two sites. Atleast we have some whom we can command on .

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