“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.

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.)

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?”

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.

I imagine many said the same when the GEICO lizard first appeared, ….”what the hell?”

Now that it’s successful - it’s brilliant.

@CU Communicator - You crack me up!

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.

Elf for President!

@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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.