According to an Adweek article called The Rules Of Viral Web Success, At Least For Now:
…the OfficeMax “Elf Yourself” campaign, which wrapped up last week, drew more than 110 million visitors. The secret [to its success]: Keep it dead simple, make it personal and give people a reason to pass it on. These sites might not win awards or wow other creative directors, but they draw big audiences by eschewing the urge to add on features and functions. “Digital agencies often get wrapped up in thinking it won’t be interesting if they don’t use the latest and greatest technology,” said Daniel Stein, CEO of EVB. “That’s a fallacy.”
My take: This is the stuff that drives CEOs/CFOs crazy. Nowhere in the article does it mention metrics like incremental awareness, improved brand affinity, or [heaven forbid] incremental sales as measures of success. According to the article, Alexa ranked Elf Yourself as a top 1000 site in 50 countries. OfficeMax does business in five.
You want rules of viral web success? A viral web effort succeeds when it:
1) Attracts consumers relevant to your firm’s product/service offering. According to OfficeMax’s SVP of Marketing “Eighty-year-old women are sending these out and 8-year-olds are doing it.” Great. But how many 80 year old women and 8 year old kids shop at OfficeMax or influence office supply purchases? Viral web efforts can be deemed successful when they connect with your firm’s customers/prospects.
2) Is relevant to your business. Elf Yourself is great — I did it myself with my kids and sent it on to their grandparents who got a kick out of it. But I can’t help but wonder how many of the 110 million visitors knew the site was sponsored by OfficeMax, or remembers a month later. Give OfficeMax credit for offering online deals in the middle of the experience, but that’s not enough of a connection. Any business could have done Elf Yourself. A viral web effort is successful when it reminds participants of the sponsoring firm.
3) Supports the brand. If OfficeMax’s brand positioning was the “fun place to get your office supplies” I’d be more willing to call a Elf Yourself a successful campaign. But in 2006/2007 OfficeMax launched a rebranding effort (with its new rubberband logo), promising an “efficient marketing model” with a “focus on efficiency and return”. Elf Yourself doesn’t really support these objective. A viral web effort is successful when it does support your firm’s brand goals.
The problem isn’t agencies getting wrapped up in the latest technologies, it’s losing sight of the business goals and objectives. And you wonder why marketing is facing accountability issues?
Technorati Tags: Marketing, Viral Marketing, Elf Yourself, Office Max
Ron Shevlin's Marketing Whims 
Because of the drumming gorilla I bought 2 chocolate bars I otherwise wouldn’t have. In one case I had a chocolate craving and had to hunt down the Cadbury Dairy Milk box out of the seemingly hundred choices. In the other case, I just wanted to buy one because I liked the gorilla and found myself near the chocolate bar counter the last time I thought about him. And I never buy chocolate bars! Why, when I can dip into our custom Currency chocolate anytime (sorry Tim, but I know you’re guilty too!)
I remember the Elf Yourself. I didn’t remember it was OfficeMax. I remember the gorilla was Cadbury because the whole thing was well-branded (purple colour, “a glass and a half full” logo, etc.) Maybe they should change it to “‘Max Yourself” and let us see how we’d look if we could put on a virtual fat suit?
Ron, you are spot on. Office Max/Depot/Mart/7-Eleven, whoever did it, generated great traffic. But they needed to find a way to tie it back to them. On the other hand, they experimented, which is more than other companies are doing. We’re talking about an office supply website here. We’d never talk about them unless they tried something like this!
I am apparently the only person on earth who doesn’t like the Cadbury “Gorilla” video. To Ron’s point, there is zero correlation between the Cadbury brand and anything going on in the video. Neither the song, nor the gorilla, nor drums have a connection back to Cadbury or its slogan.
Like many ads these days, it could have borne the logo of any advertiser, just like the “Elfed” campaign. It’s purely a novelty act. “This moment of outrageous entertainment is brought to you by _____________.”
The majority of “viral” stuff is pretty gimmicky, such as drumming gorillas, dancing elves, or the “Subservient Chicken,” (which is arguably one of the best examples of viral marketing ever, specifically for its relevance to the “Have It Your Way” brand).
Inasmuch, I’m not sure “viral” intersects very well with B2B, which is essentially OfficeMax’s business model.
Also, we have no idea how much it cost…we’re talking about return but not investment. How can we say this was a failure without knowing that key data? If 1 out of 110 people noticed the OfficeMax logo, that means one million people can attribute their brief grin to the office supply company. If 1/10 of those people were in countries OfficeMax serves (though I’d imagine a large majority of the visits were from the good old USA), we’re still talking about 100,000 impressions.
In an age of fewer and fewer smiles, Elf Yourself provided us with our fair share. To me, there has to be some goodwill attached to that – whether it be 110,000,000 people or 10,000. Is OfficeMax now going to conquer the office supply world because of the campaign? Absolutely not. Was Elf Yourself a worthwhile campaign? I think it’s too soon to tell – especially with limited data.
Ron, I completely agree. Elf Yourself is a failure for me because I have no idea who created it. It’s not reinforcing any kind of brand positioning at all. Office-who? My office uses Staples, and we’re not switching because of Elf Yourself, funny though it may be, that’s for sure. What I thought is brilliant in the office supply category is Staples’ “That was easy.” They backed that slogan up by redesigning their stores for the easiest navigation to find what you need possible. And you can actually buy a “That was easy” button for $5 (it’s a 4″ round button, and when you press it, a recording says “That was easy!” Someone in my office bought one, and let me tell you, it gets slapped ALL THE TIME. It’s a hilarious toy to have lying around the office. We still have it, several years after the campaign launched.
You have to use your brain, up-front, (I know, asking a lot) to connect whatever campaign you are cooking up to the brand that you are trying to promote. The Office-whatever with Elf Yourself is identical to bizarre/humorous Super Bowl commercials. Yes, you were entertained for a minute, and you might have laughed, or been shocked, but when your friend asks you who the ad was for three minutes later, you can’t remember for the life of you, because there was zilch connection between the ad and the company or product supposedly being offered. The last great viral marketing campaign that I am aware of was the Simpsons’ movie “Simpsonize Yourself.” (I call it Word of Eye Marketing.) Brilliant because it gave everyone something that they could have for themselves (a cute cartoon picture of themselves), and seeing others have one on their favorite social networking sites (no matter what site it was), made you wonder how they got it, or gave you the idea you could do it yourself if you googled for how/where to do it. And anyone remotely aware that there was a Simpson movie just out in theaters was then reminded of that fact and to go see it. It all tied in nicely with traditional marketing such as TV ads, and Burger King kid-meal toy (even though I can’t keep track of which restaurant has which kids meal toys, my 9 year-old KNOWS. All of a sudden I had requests for “can we go to Burger King today?” during this promotion). Anyway, it’s rather clear that this campaign is both viral and effective in reinforcing the Simpsons brand and generating fantastic awareness for the movie, through both traditional marketing and social networks. I don’t need any analytics to know that this is about as good as it gets (so far) with Marketing 2.0.
Also, the new viral is social. There are hundreds of applications happening on Facebook right now that are going viral. The brilliance of Facebook and it’s development platform, is that if there is something that resonates with/is useful for people, awareness will spread within their circle very quickly. And it doesn’t even have to be apps. Events can also go viral this way. If you have an event, make sure you get it on Facebook.
And while I completely agree that the article is off-base by gushing about the effectiveness of Elf Yourself without any sort of statistics to back it up (who cares if 8-year-olds are Elfing themselves unless they happen to be the children of office procurement departments sending it to their parents), one point of the article is spot-on: If you want lots of people to do it/see it, keep it simple; don’t use fancy technology. And definitely don’t make them download an application.
@Matt-
You’ve got a good point too. How much would you pay for 100K impressions? It reminds me of the recent Taco Bell stunt the put on during the World Series to give away a free hard taco to every American if someone stole a base. Relatively small investment, huge impression.
All of the metric requirements are great. And in most cases,
where a viral success is claimed on a few million impressions, it’s probably important to make sure that the site works hard to deliver results.
But in this case, OfficeMax simply leveraged off an asset they created last year. The cost of the effort (other than bandwidth) was probably relatively small, but the reach seems to have been phenomenal.
OfficeMax likely doesn’t care if only 1 in 1000 users was influenced to act. That population is probably larger than most viral efforts out there that people brag about as a success.
It’s probably more fair to look at this and evaluate it as a giant PR effort (where it’s not quite so much about targeting). The thing seemed to be everywhere, from blogs to magazines to CNN to the morning shows. Just imagining how much is spend by companies in PR fees trying to get a fraction of this exposure.
Bottom line, while it wasn’t a targeted effort, it probably didn’t need to be. For a few bucks, the likely got their money’s worth.
Costs are often unseen in such efforts. No telling how much staff energy and management thinking time was required to pull this off.
Marketing efforts need to focus on sales results. Management already spends too much precious time in unproductive activity.
There is potential here. But movement does not equal progress.
I’m with Ron on this one. You had better find a way to quantify all resource expenditures whether they are actual dollars spent or planning/implementation energy.
Viral – almost certainly. Marketing? Not sure –
Obsessed with the (thankfully fading) novelty of ‘viral’, both marketers and commentators tend to forget that it’s just a mechanism (channel) for reaching audiences with a message. (Audience, message and channel are still the essential ingredients of communication, remove one and it just doesn’t happen).
The viral channel has two levels of sophistication, critically differentiated by the engagement of the ‘infected’ individuals (network nodes). At the first level (where most existing campaigns are drilling at present), the channel is a many-to-many medium for spreading a one-to-many message. The company generates the message (with a target audience in mind), ‘unleashes the virus’ (in Seth’s words) and hopes for the best. At the second level (only a handful of pioneers are dipping a toe in the ocean for now) the network ‘node’ is involved in generating the message – in content as much as form. Resulting in a living behive of many-to-many messages…
Apologies for the patronising reminder of basics you all know – but in the above light, what has the campaign in question done?
The channel is apparently there, they have created a many-to-many medium where ‘something’ spreads really far (50 countries, wow! I can’t even list as many from memory 🙂
What is the target audience? 80-year old grannies or 8-year old kids – or both? I didn’t hear anything in the report about very certain segments and clusters like 35-year old esecretaries who routinely order the stationery in smaller offices like ours? Or 40-year old procurement executives in larger corporate offices who do all the comparisson spreadsheets and arm-wrestling price negotiations? (Or their 50-year old bosses who hold the budgets and sign the ‘supplier of choice’ contracts?) Defining a clear target audience was apparently not in the brief (or in the competence?) of this agency (and their client).
And the message? Was it a brand awareness campaign? Even without data to calculate the impression costs, 1 in 10 (as another comment suggests) viewers noticing whose campaign is this, is a very, very low number for a brand campaign. And in this case it sounds like it’s 1 in 100 or less… Or was it a product promotion? (even less, I think). What exactly did they want to tell (those they had no idea they are talking to)? Even if the message was ‘This company is innovative and fun to deal with’ (as many comments try to interpret it), the question ‘Which company?’ remains…
Most marketers (and agencies, even to a greater extent) tend to focus on one aspect/ingredient of communication in isolation from the others. Very often we hear praise of brilliantly crafted messages. Indeed, great copywriters and creative teams often succeed to really ‘say’ something, and say it very, very convincingly, in a memorable way. Then this is painted on a facade with ‘great traffic’ passing by (100 cars a minute, with every driver having less than a second to read the message – if he stops looking at the road ahead, that is). Or an agency boasts about the clever analytics they used to segment and micro-segment a target audience. Great work, but that audience was addressed in a medium they don’t bother to watch, with response rates below the statistical noise.
The 3-legged stool of (marketing – but also any) communication needs all 3: audience, channel and message. Or you spectacularly fall.
‘Viral’ is no exception.
There’s something to be said that Elf Yourself was counter to OfficeMax’s marketing message of improving return – hurting return for its customers (in terms of lost productivity and resources, granted, minimal…but those little increments add up). Of course, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, so it may not be terribly relevant, but it pleases me to point this out.
But that raises the point that bad marketing, no matter the investment (if you blow it little or you blow it big, you just blow it), is detrimental to that carefully crafted asset.
But let’s give props to a great execution of viral marketing, creating your own Simpson’s character: http://www.simpsonsmovie.com/main.html
@Warrior: It’s about INCREMENTAL awareness, not absolute awareness. If I was already aware of OfficeMax AND positively oriented towards the firm, the viral campaign may have had some effect of strengthening that connection, but the real point is that, by simply counting hits, no one knows the real impact — and thus, can NOT claim that the effort was successful.
@Robert: Thanks for taking the time to comment. I think you’re absolutely right that the PR they got of this was immense. But then that really raises another question: What’s the bottom line value of PR to a firm that already has high awareness and name recognition?
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Two thoughts:
1. I elfed-myself. (and that’s just fun to say, write AND do). I did not know OfficeMax gave me the toy.
2. I wouldn’t give up on them. I mean, we just blogged about it. We’re keeping it alive and giving Office Max exactly what it wanted…word-of-mouth.
To all of you who poo-pooed it becuase the “Elf” wasn’t relevant. That’s just sad. How is a nocturnal and often highly vocal lizard relevant to the Government Employees Insurance Company?
It is now – that’s good viral (or whatever you call it) marketing.
@Denise: You’re not serious are you? Gekko, Geico, get it? The thing that makes it successful is that it isn’t some “hit and run” thing. They’ve stuck with it, used it in a number of campaigns, integrated it into their Web site, and, in the ads, have the stupid little thing talk about how to save money — which supports their brand positioning. But this isn’t even worth discussing because it’s not a “viral” campaign, so it’s not even a fair comparison.
@ Shevlin – (pulllleeeaassseee….lizard and government employees – no connection BUT they MADE it a connection) my point is…how do you KNOW that OfficeMax is not planning a similar campaign? Give them a chance.
Viral or whatever. It’s fun, it’s good and in my opinion did its job to get so much discussion here.
Elf for President!
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Since I didn’t elf myself, I wonder what the process was to create an elf email. Did you have to go to the main OfficeMax website? If so, then maybe this was a ploy to drive online holiday sales. (Ron’s original post seems to imply that “viral” was the goal. Maybe it was just a consequence.)
I’m sure that OfficeMax has data on (1) the number of people who generated elf emails and what purchases they made, and (2) the number of recipients who clicked on the OfficeMax logo in the elf email and then made a purchase.
Maybe the elf campaign had little to do with awareness and everything to do with incremental increases in holiday sales. Maybe it was a low-cost dragnet, hoping to ensnare “1 in a 1,000” folks who just might think about getting a camera or a flash drive. If this is the case, we may want to lighten up on them.
@ Denise: A spokesman used for 10 years like the GEICO lizard is not the same thing as elves used once in a Christmas promotion – period. The recurring spokesman is a tool to build long-term familiarity with a brand. A seasonal character used one time is a gag, a gambit.
This is doubly true when the “character” in question is a million elves created by millions of different users. It’s impossible for OfficeMax to sustain ownership of an “elf position” in the minds of consumers when they themselves are the elves.
Maybe Office Max saw the success Staples was having with the Easy Button campaign and figured they were elfed. 😉
@rshevlin – Absolutely. We’re missing way too much information to evaluate the program, though, wouldn’t you agree? I will concur that the AdWeek article was bunk…but I can’t agree with your evaluation of Elf Yourself until we have more information (cost of the program and end-user behavior in particular).
@CU Communicator – You crack me up! 🙂
@ Pilcher – see Warrior’s comment above.
I imagine many said the same when the GEICO lizard first appeared, ….”what the hell?”
Now that it’s successful – it’s brilliant.
@ Denise – I actually liked the GEICO lizard’s original accent. It changed about two years ago, and it used to not be so proper.
I wonder if its brilliance is directly related to the fact that they just stuck with it long enough to be “branded” in our minds.
@ Brett – good point. A friend of mine told me the definition of brand is: practicing active restraint. In a weird way I think GEICO has done a good job of that.
Okay guys, if you are suggesting that OfficeMax either will or should stick with spokeselves, pass me whatever you’re smoking.
@Jeffry I’m merely suggesting 110 million happy viewers of a company advertisement is a good thing.
About the metric of “impressions,” I agree: 110 million for such a low investment is impressive. Some may argue that no one knows the cost of the investment, but I think everyone intuitively understands that the cost-per-impression for this campaign works in OfficeMax’s favor. Bigtime.
I (for 1-in-110 million) cringed when these “elfed” emails first started popping up in my inbox. The first one was “okay.” The next two were from different friends and family members, and… Well, let’s just say, the novelty wore off.
I got four total. Did I get counted four times? Am I a “happy viewer?”
Think about it, we’re all here on a blog discussing OfficeMax and their efforts, to me they did an excellent job of using this viral effort to at least start conversation about them. Conversation about your brand is almost always a good thing. It got their name on the radar for people, probably more than Staples “that was easy” campaign. It wouldn’t make me shop there at the moment, but at least now they have a channel they know will work in the future.
@Andy: Except that we’re blogging marketers. It would be bad enough if we were simply marketers (who have an inordinate interest in discussing these kinds of things), but some of the commenters are bloggers on top of that, with that gene that prevents us from knowing when the conversation is over.
🙂
@Ron: You’re dead on about not confusing product success among “real” consumers with product discussion among marketers.
However, I wonder just how many products have seen a spike in sales among the “Marketer” demographic due to our own discussion. A few that come to mind that have been favorite talking points are Dyson, Apple, JetBlue, Whole Foods and Krispy Kreme. You can only talk about them so much until you actually become a fan yourself.
(For the record, I am not suggesting OfficeMax succeeded with this.)
This was released today in Marketing Magazine:
“Giving people a chance to “elf themselves” drove up Canadian traffic to the OfficeMax website a remarkable 395% in December.
The OfficeMax website, which let visitors insert personal headshots into an animated dancing elf greeting, had 2.7 million unique visitors last month, up from just 551,000 in November, making it the top gaining site in terms of Canadian traffic, according to the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service.”
Read the full story here: http://www.marketingmag.ca/daily/20080122/national2.html
It would be interesting to see what Canadian sales #s all that traffic generated. If I come across anything, I’ll post it here.
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