Viral Internet Advertising Elf Yourself 2.0, OfficeMax 2007

Following the success of 2006 holiday season, OfficeMax launched again Elf Yourself. In 2007 holiday season, ElfYourself.com had become an online holiday destination. This time you could upload a headshot of yourself and three other friends or members of your family, to create a troupe of festively dressed dancing elves.

After six weeks of being live, the holiday site, ElfYourself.com, attracted a booming number of visitors and hit the bull’s eye of viral success, leaving Subservient Chicken, the Whopper Freakout and Monk-e-Mail all in the dust.

Elf Yourself 2007 Marketing Campaign Metrics (11/21/07 to 1/2/08):

• More than 193 million site visits with 123 million elves created
• Average number of ElfYourself movies created per user: approx. 2 movies
• Over 210 million elf dances were viewed
• 60 elves were created per second
• Users spent a combined 2,600 years on the site
• 5,456 blogs posts about ElfYourself (Google Blog Search, 11/07 to 1/08)
• Average time on site: 7.5 minutes
• One in 10 Americans visited ElfYourself.com (Nielsen Online Strategic Services)
• Ranked No. 51 most visited website on the web (HitWise Intelligence, 12/07)
• Top-ranked site in the Humor category, holding the position for the last 3 weeks. (HitWise Intelligence, 1/08)
• Ranked the most popular Entertainment – Humour website visited by Australians and New Zealanders in December 2007 (Hitwise)
• Some 53% of visitors returned to the site
• Ranked No. 1 site on “Movers & Shakers” (Alexa Rankings)
• Ranked among top 1,000 sites in 50 countries (Alexa Rankings, 12/07)
• Three awards wins, including the “Best Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign”, People’s Choice Award for “Best User Defined Experience” and “Best of Show”
• Featured on CNN American Morning, ABC World News Now, Good Morning America, TODAY Show, TNT Sports News, Fox News, NYT BITS Blog, Rosie Chat, & TBS The Daily Flog.
• 63% of participants who shop for office supplies at least 10 times per year were aware of Elf Yourself.
• 95% of those who visited Elf Yourself claimed they would likely visit Elf Yourself again in 2008.
• More than one-third of those who visited Elf Yourself said the site influenced their decision to visit OfficeMax, and about one-third of visitors said the site improved their perception of OfficeMax.