OfficeMax: More Than 57 Million Have 'Elfed' Themselves

  • by December 17, 2008
Elf Yourself Disco With Ace Hardware's "Ace Your Face" viral campaign now allowing consumers to upload their own face choices into irreverent greeting cards, MediaPost is checking in on OfficeMax's already classic "ElfYourself" promotion.

The program, which allows consumers to create dancing elves with the faces of themselves, friends, family, pets, etc., has stormed into its third year. By Monday, 57 million elves had been created during the first three weeks of the most current campaign.

The typical user so far has stayed on the site for 15 minutes--double the 7.5 minutes for last year's total campaign--and has created 4.5 separate elf-centric videos, up from two a year ago. OfficeMax was also reporting 11,088 blog posts mentioning "ElfYourself," already doubling last year's total number of blog postings (5,456).

To help fulfill this year's goals of deeper consumer engagement, higher retention, greater brand association and stronger social media presence, OfficeMax teamed up for the first time with JibJab Media, the online entertainment folks still best known for their 2004 election parody of "This Land is Your Land" (www.jibjab.com/originals/this_land).

Last holiday season, the companies landed comScore's top two positions for fastest-growing Web sites when ElfYourself received more than 193 million site visits and JibJab featured such insert-your-own-photo animated greeting card fare as "Snowball Fight" and "Menorah Hora."

Under the new partnership with JibJab, ElfYourself was able to add a Facebook application, which had amassed 600,000 users as of Tuesday. Also, the number of elves allowed per video has jumped to five from four, and three new dances--disco, country and the Charleston--have been added to the original "classic" steps.

JibJab's technology has also allowed users to merchandise the elves from their videos through printed greeting cards, ornaments, mouse pads, coffee mugs, playing cards and other items.

ElfYourself was created originally by agencies Toy New York and EVB San Francisco.

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