Now that we’re safely through both the Thanksgiving eat-athelon and the kickoff of the various shopping seasons, offline and online, you may be ready for a bit of a respite from holiday cheer.

If so, too bad for you, because the “Elf Yourself” season is upon us, courtesy of OfficeMax. And this year, they’re taking that grassroots hit more viral than ever.

The basic concept now needs about as much explanation as the premise behind “It’s a Wonderful Life”: You upload photos of yourself and your loved ones and mount them onto pipestem-legged elf bodies boogeying and band-dancing to holiday tunes, then send them off to your friends. The feature has been a holiday mainstay since taking off in 2006, a lucky strike among a barrelful of 20 or so interactive games and ideas that OfficeMax and agency EVB came up with to build a little buzz around what is normally a fairly slow time of year in the office-supply game.

Lucky indeed. That first year the site got 36 million visits in two months, thanks in no small part to a lot of publicity on the morning TV shows. The next year saw more elves, more dances and more hits—193 million. Last year animation platform JibJab got involved, but while the animation got more sophisticated, the views dropped off to by about three quarters, thanks to a registration requirement.

This year the registration’s out again and the viral push is back, in a variety of channels—all of them smart ways to keep the promotion fresh. For one thing, users can now share their Elf Yourself videos to their Facebook pages and can use photos directly from those pages, thanks to Facebook Connect. That’s a good move, with Facebook’s wall fast outpacing e-mail sharing as the way people share their photos. The app already has about 75,000 active users.

For folks who can’t get enough elvish stuff, the little guys have a Twitter account at Twitter.com/ElfYourself that serves up daily nuggets of wisdom such as “Today in elf history: 1884, end of the Nutcracker Wars.” You laugh—but the account has 500 followers.

But the most interesting move of all is that OfficeMax and Tribal DDB have taken the elves live and mounted the results on YouTube, in a flash mob dance video that’s earned more than 200,000 views in the little over two weeks that it’s been up. Before your eyes, 400 green-felt-clad street elves in New York’s Union Square waltz, step, dosey-do and Bollywood-shimmy through a 2:30 routine that really cries out to be watched more than once.



“It’s the first of a trilogy, like ‘Star Wars’,” says OfficeMax CMO Bob Thacker. “We’ll be doing two more and launching them one at a time in the next few weeks. The next ones will go back and trace how all these elves got to Union Square.”

In the past, users have been able to post their own personal Elf videos to YouTube. “We’ve had as many as four or five hundred videos of people doing the dance,” Thacker says. “But this is the first time we’ve put up a video of our own.”

This enhancement of the social component of a very successful promotion comes naturally for OfficeMax. Thacker has said publicly in the past that his company was forced to re-examine all its efforts in “dumb media” to make sure they were getting the biggest bang for their short marketing dollars. (The company has been in turnaround mode since 2006 and reported lower than expected earnings in its Q3 report at the end of October.)

Stumbling upon something as viral as Elf Yourself may have been largely a matter of luck, as Thacker has pointed out on several occasions. But having been fortunate enough to bottle that lightning once, OfficeMax has been pretty focused on building a community around the feature in subsequent years.

“We were quick to learn [social marketing] because we really didn’t have any alternatives,” he says. “Our budgets were so small that it really just made sense for us. So we were able to start learning social media back in the pioneer days, back when Twitter happened only among birds. And this campaign has tried to correctly use all those forms of media.”

What can engagement-heavy campaigns like this do for the bottom line? After all, the branding on all the iterations of Elf Yourself—including this one—is relatively light. I’m not sure the first one had much of a brand ID at all, and in the last two years branding is pretty much confined to a modest clickable sign that says the game is “brought to you by OfficeMax”.

“We did research and measured the level of awareness, and over 40% of hundreds of millions of users were able to say that OfficeMax brought this to them,” says Thacker. “They also said they thought we were more innovative, more fun, and cared more about our customers, and that they were more apt to shop with us for those reasons.”

So the brand associations aren’t obscured by the fun—always a tough call when you’re trying to engage users with something they’ll want to pass along to their friends.

Interestingly, last year OfficeMax found a way to integrate sales directly into the play. Besides raising the level of the animation, the partnership with JibJab also enabled OfficeMax to offer a line of Elf Yourself merchandise—everything from greeting cards and mouse pads to coffee mugs and Christmas ornaments, all emblazoned with the buyer’s elvish incarnation.

“The merchandise was so successful that it paid for the marketing campaign and generated a profit on top of that,” Thacker says. “So it was a marketing campaign that was also a profit center.”

Now that’s a reason to be jolly.

Now that we’re safely through both the Thanksgiving eat-athelon and the kickoff of the various shopping seasons, offline and online, you may be ready for a bit of a respite from holiday cheer.

If so, too bad for you, because the “Elf Yourself” season is upon us, courtesy of OfficeMax. And this year, they’re taking that grassroots hit more viral than ever.

The basic concept now needs about as much explanation as the premise behind “It’s a Wonderful Life”: You upload photos of yourself and your loved ones and mount them onto pipestem-legged elf bodies boogeying and band-dancing to holiday tunes, then send them off to your friends. The feature has been a holiday mainstay since taking off in 2006, a lucky strike among a barrelful of 20 or so interactive games and ideas that OfficeMax and agency EVB came up with to build a little buzz around what is normally a fairly slow time of year in the office-supply game.

Lucky indeed. That first year the site got 36 million visits in two months, thanks in no small part to a lot of publicity on the morning TV shows. The next year saw more elves, more dances and more hits—193 million. Last year animation platform JibJab got involved, but while the animation got more sophisticated, the views dropped off to by about three quarters, thanks to a registration requirement.

This year the registration’s out again and the viral push is back, in a variety of channels—all of them smart ways to keep the promotion fresh. For one thing, users can now share their Elf Yourself videos to their Facebook pages and can use photos directly from those pages, thanks to Facebook Connect. That’s a good move, with Facebook’s wall fast outpacing e-mail sharing as the way people share their photos. The app already has about 75,000 active users.

For folks who can’t get enough elvish stuff, the little guys have a Twitter account at Twitter.com/ElfYourself that serves up daily nuggets of wisdom such as “Today in elf history: 1884, end of the Nutcracker Wars.” You laugh—but the account has 500 followers.

But the most interesting move of all is that OfficeMax and Tribal DDB have taken the elves live and mounted the results on YouTube, in a flash mob dance video that’s earned more than 200,000 views in the little over two weeks that it’s been up. Before your eyes, 400 green-felt-clad street elves in New York’s Union Square waltz, step, dosey-do and Bollywood-shimmy through a 2:30 routine that really cries out to be watched more than once.



“It’s the first of a trilogy, like ‘Star Wars’,” says OfficeMax CMO Bob Thacker. “We’ll be doing two more and launching them one at a time in the next few weeks. The next ones will go back and trace how all these elves got to Union Square.”

In the past, users have been able to post their own personal Elf videos to YouTube. “We’ve had as many as four or five hundred videos of people doing the dance,” Thacker says. “But this is the first time we’ve put up a video of our own.”

This enhancement of the social component of a very successful promotion comes naturally for OfficeMax. Thacker has said publicly in the past that his company was forced to re-examine all its efforts in “dumb media” to make sure they were getting the biggest bang for their short marketing dollars. (The company has been in turnaround mode since 2006 and reported lower than expected earnings in its Q3 report at the end of October.)

Stumbling upon something as viral as Elf Yourself may have been largely a matter of luck, as Thacker has pointed out on several occasions. But having been fortunate enough to bottle that lightning once, OfficeMax has been pretty focused on building a community around the feature in subsequent years.

“We were quick to learn [social marketing] because we really didn’t have any alternatives,” he says. “Our budgets were so small that it really just made sense for us. So we were able to start learning social media back in the pioneer days, back when Twitter happened only among birds. And this campaign has tried to correctly use all those forms of media.”

What can engagement-heavy campaigns like this do for the bottom line? After all, the branding on all the iterations of Elf Yourself—including this one—is relatively light. I’m not sure the first one had much of a brand ID at all, and in the last two years branding is pretty much confined to a modest clickable sign that says the game is “brought to you by OfficeMax”.

“We did research and measured the level of awareness, and over 40% of hundreds of millions of users were able to say that OfficeMax brought this to them,” says Thacker. “They also said they thought we were more innovative, more fun, and cared more about our customers, and that they were more apt to shop with us for those reasons.”

So the brand associations aren’t obscured by the fun—always a tough call when you’re trying to engage users with something they’ll want to pass along to their friends.

Interestingly, last year OfficeMax found a way to integrate sales directly into the play. Besides raising the level of the animation, the partnership with JibJab also enabled OfficeMax to offer a line of Elf Yourself merchandise—everything from greeting cards and mouse pads to coffee mugs and Christmas ornaments, all emblazoned with the buyer’s elvish incarnation.

“The merchandise was so successful that it paid for the marketing campaign and generated a profit on top of that,” Thacker says. “So it was a marketing campaign that was also a profit center.”

Now that’s a reason to be jolly.