Madison Avenue is coming up with a digital variation on an Irving Berlin standard: The campaign has ended, but the advertising lingers on.

Thanks to Internet staples like YouTube, Facebook and the special websites known as microsites, consumers can still see ads after the completion of the campaigns of which they were part — not unlike satellites that remain in space, visible to the eye, long after they have stopped being tracked.

The ongoing online presence for ads is different from how campaigns conclude in the traditional media, when television commercials and print advertisements cease appearing or billboards and signs in stores are taken down.

For instance, a wacky character named the Subservient Chicken, introduced in April 2004 to help sell a new TenderCrisp chicken sandwich for Burger King, is still on display on a section of the Burger King Web site (bk.com/en/us/campaigns/subservient-chicken.html).

The character was created by the Barbarian Group, now majority-owned by Cheil Worldwide, for the Burger King agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, a unit of MDC Partners. A recent visitor to the site was still able to type in an instruction to the character (“Hop on one foot”), which he promptly performed.

Campaigns now “are not necessarily with a start and end date,” said Marcel LeBrun, chief executive at Radian6, an agency that specializes in social media for clients like Discover, Microsoft Xbox and United Parcel Service.

If marketers are striving to “build and foster a community of advocates,” LeBrun said, they ought not be like “politicians who go online around election time and then disappear after the election.”

Another example of online pitches that stick around is a humorous e-mail service sponsored by CareerBuilder, the job-search Web site, called Monk-e-mail. More than four years after its introduction, the service is still available online (monk-e-mail.com).

Monk-e-mail was brought out as part of a campaign for CareerBuilder that likened a bad job to working in an office filled with chimpanzees. The chimpanzee campaign first began on the Super Bowl in 2005 and finished at the end of 2006.

The peak for Monk-e-mail came in April 2006, when there were more than 4.4 million visits in 30 days. The service remains popular: 20 percent of the total of almost 55 million visits have taken place after 2008, according to data provided by CareerBuilder, and there were 818,000 visits in the first quarter of this year.

As for the inevitable wear-out factor for online ads, “when your peak is tens of millions of users, the tail-off is hundreds of thousands of users,” Seidman said. “And that’s a pretty good tail-off.”

One reason that most ads from a concluded campaign disappear is that when advertisers change agencies, the previous work is usually discarded like yesterday’s mashed potatoes. In this instance, Monk-e-mail has survived not one but two shifts of the CareerBuilder account.

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