• by Mark Naples , April 16, 2004

Well, it still is really cool. And it's making some companies a ton of money while driving some of the best campaigns on the Web.

So what if Search made Rich Media take a back seat these past few months. Rich Media is where convergence will take place on the desktop, at least in terms of the visual experience.

Take the Burger King Chicken, a campaign created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, that Tobi Elkin wrote about in today's MediaDailyNews (and what everyone's talking about). Assuredly, you've done the chicken dance... or, made the chicken dance. While this isn't Rich Media per se, since it's a viral file being passed around, and not an ad being served to a client, it does represent to me what Rich Media is heading toward. So, please bear with me a second.

For those of you who have not seen the Burger King chicken, it's an edgy, seamy, sweaty guy in an ill-fitting chicken suit that does whatever users type into a query box. Jump! Flop! Break dance! (You order the chicken your way - get it?)

The BK chicken looks like he might be starring in a low budget porno, and that's sort of the point. Burger King is capitalizing on its edgy television creative, some of which creates mildly salacious situations out of condiments, or features office workers giving each other a hard time for kissing up to the boss, who's ordered the same thing. ("There's two buns left here in the bag - wanna kiss em?")

Burger King finally seems to be getting it, or at least taking some welcome risks. Fast food burgers are about as commoditized as any food can be. And BK is banking that there are a ton of Americans who hate both Justin "Wardrobe Malfunction" Timberlake and McDonald's enough, that this kind of brand awareness will translate into more sales.

Good for them, I say. I've never understood what they were trying to do otherwise. At least this makes some sense, in a weird sort of way. A gajillion people have forwarded the video file, that much I know. Even if only a half-gajillion of them associate their experience with BK, that's a few million chicken sandwiches that they'll sell, and McDonald's and KFC won't.

So, whither Rich Media? Why can't a similar ad be served in a more contextual setting, like within ESPN Motion? Most of us have seen and maybe even admired the "This is SportsCenter" campaign that Wieden and Kennedy has made into one of the coolest ongoing creative franchises ever on TV. Why not on the Web, and why not with an interactive component?

The base ad could be served within an ongoing, contextual feature that was streamed, and it could easily bring the user back to a site within which they could enjoy this kind of interactivity, or maybe even download something like this scurrilous chicken and send it to their broadband-sportin' friends, each of whom would be cookied for future campaigns. Is this that complicated? The numbers that Tobi reported this morning don't lie: More than 8 million hits from an initial distribution of 20 people? Almost nine minutes of interaction time on average? Fantastic!

What would keep this from working as part of a paid Search campaign? Just in the past year or so, we've seen what the monetary power of paid Search is. Now that Gmail is a few months from reality, how many ways do you think it will be monetizing your inbox?

Rich Media is what's going to keep people coming back. Measuring all manner of interactive through the usual Direct Response metrics like ROI and topline revenue moves our industry further and further from one that will claim real dollars beyond the leftover five percent or so that goes to DM.

If we want to be media, we have to brand in ways that make images stick and align the entities paying for the creative and the buy with users' impulses. Dynamic Rich Media still does that better than anything else I've seen online. And, believe me, as much as I wish I'd never seen that gnarly chicken, it beats the feathers out of that weird guy in the McDonald's ad who shaves his mono-brow. By the way, can anyone explain to me what that's supposed to imply, in a branding sort of way?