Lightning Strikes Twice for OfficeMax Elves

Apparently, been-there-done-that doesn’t apply when it comes to people wanting to make themselves look like elves.

According to an article on AdAge.com, OfficeMax’s ElfYourself holiday campaign turned in some pretty incredible numbers. It’s all the more astonishing because they did the exact same thing last year. I admit I rolled my eyes when I heard about this year’s installment. “Can’t they come up with anything more creative,” I remember thinking.
According to AdAge.com, people created 123 million elves this year, up from 11 million last year. By December, according to Hitwise data cited in the article, the ElfYourself Web site (if you still want to create an elf, you’re out of luck now that the campaign is done) had risen to #55 among all Web sites based on market share of visits.

The numbers get even more crazy. In December, according to Nielsen stats cited by AdAge.com, 16% of the active Web audience visited the site - amounting to 26.4 million people.

Let me throw in one more stat, from comScore: Traffic to OfficeMax.com was up 170% between November and December, to 15.3 million unique visitors.

Did we all have absolutely nothing better to do when we were supposed to be out shopping and decorating and drinking eggnog? Why did lightning strike twice for OfficeMax and this viral promotion?

I’m still shaking my head in disbelief, but I’ve got a few ideas why: Like the little red button in competitor Staples’ “Easy Button” ad campaign, this viral was easy for consumers to create, easy to send and easy to watch (they used old-fashioned email). It has started to become a brand icon for OfficeMax (the company used the image in some of its holiday marketing materials, meaning some people probably went looking for it). And it made the consumer the star of the campaign - literally.

Can OfficeMax do this again next year? Given this year’s success, I’d have to say yes.

Super Bowl Ads: Less Buzz, Still Great?

Once the Seattle Seahawks got knocked out of the playoffs, I tuned out of the Super Bowl hype for a while. Of course, when I saw the results of yesterday’s game between the Packers and Giants, I kind of wish I had watched.

Maybe marketers, like me, are saving all of their energy for the Super Bowl. I had a vague feeling that I wasn’t hearing a lot about the spots that would appear during the big game, and I guess I was right.

According to analysis by Cymfony discussed in a ClickZ news article, this year’s Super Bowl advertisers are doing a lot less pre-game publicity for their advertising. Says Jim Nail of Cymfony: “the volume of traditional online discussion and media coverage is a lot lower than last year.”

According to a briefing Jim gave me in December as part of my work for eMarketer, marketers that hope for post-game discussion in the blogs may be disappointed: 78% of the total volume of Super Bowl ad discussion happened in the three days following the game.

However, and this is important for those of you who pay attention to social media, in last year’s game the traditional media coverage that happened before the game played an integral role in spurring online conversation after the game. In fact, advertisers that released their ad prior to the game ended up with up to five times as much coverage and discussion AFTER the game.

So, what’s holding this year’s crop of marketers back? ClickZ says it may be that UGC, such a buzzword during last year’s game (see: Doritos), is a been-there, done-that. But surely a few marketers have something interesting up their sleeves. So, let’s get this game started!

In the meantime, Cymfony’s Super Bowl Advertisers blog has a running commentary on the latest news.