While it may seem that an ad campaign for a business chain specializing in professional office supplies couldn’t hold much entertainment for consumers, this next example proves that any company, no matter what products it sells, can make a fun and creative online presence for its target audience. Office Max is a chain of stores that specialize in office supplies and in the 2006 Holiday Season launched its elfyourself.com viral campaign/website. The website allows visitors to create their very own Christmas themed video featuring the friends and family of their choice. Each viewer inserts pictures, those pictures are transposed onto elf bodies, and a video is created featuring each visitors customized elf friends dancing in silly ways to Christmas music. The visitor is then able to forward their own personalized and Office Max branded video to all of their friends and family.
The link to the website was sent out to Office Max shoppers via direct email, in order to make it easy for consumers to pass it along to their friends. The campaign was created to primarily target working aged adults and offer them some silly holiday entertainment while in the office, but ending up gaining attention from all age groups. The website was huge hit and was passed among many offices, but also caught on with many kids and teens as well. The type of fun that Office Max offers at this website is appropriate and entertaining for all ages and asks consumers to engage directly with the brand with a fun branded experience. The website also features links to product info, a store locator, Office Max ads, and other helpful information.
The success of this site can be attributed to a few factors. First, is the fact that the website holds a great deal of amusement and fun for its visitors. This kind of user-generated fun is appropriate and relevant to people of all ages. The Christmas Season is a joyous time of year with an emphasis on spreading joy, kindness, and laughs to those closest to you. The Office Max website provides consumers with a amusing way to spread holiday cheer with friends and family. The videos are so silly that it is hard not to laugh and feel joy when watching them. These feelings are then tied to the Office Max brand in the minds of consumers and will hopefully be remembered when purchasing office equipment in the future. Another reason the Elf Yourself site was such a success, is because the site makes passing the videos along to friends and family extremely easy for its users. Because of this easy message transferability, it is more likely that site visitors will actually pass the message along to others. While Office Max did send out emails to consumers advertising the site, these emails probably didn’t earn the site as much traffic as the emails forwarded to others by friends and family did. This is because viewers may have seen an email in their inbox from Office Max and assumed it was spam or junk mail, possibly disregarding it before even opening the message. On the other hand, when the sender is a personal friend or family member a person is much more likely to open the email as well as pursue the actual content of the email when they know and trust the sender of the message.
Though the website is only fully functioning for a couple of months out of the year, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get Office Max enough attention. During the 2007 holiday season alone, the website was visited by over 193 million viewers and over 123 million elves were created. In addition to this, because of the sites huge popularity it was featured on a wide variety of credible news shows including Good Morning America, the Today show, CNN, ABC World News, Fox News, and more, gaining the site a lot of positive PR in the press. This publicity served as unofficial advertising for Office Max and created more buzz around the site, inspiring interest from consumers, and eventually driving more visitors to the site.
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