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.