OfficeMax Takes Elves beyond the Dance Floor

Four years ago, Office Max caught lightning in a bottle with its viral “Elf Yourself” feature that let users paste their photo onto a dancing elf and share the result with friends. As legend has it, “Elf Yourself” was one of about 20 different online games developed by the office-supply chain in collaboration with agencies Toy New York and EVB for the 2006 holiday season. It just happened to take off right away, and the other games became an afterthought. Since then, a reported 416 million customized elves have been created, and the ElfYourself.com microsite has received more than 378 million visits. In August Forbes magazine named “Elf Yourself” the seventh best social media campaign, right after VW’s “fun Theory” and ahead of Evian’s “Roller Babies”.

The site is back again this year, powered by JibJab as it has been for the last two years and with some new dances. But this season Office Max has also returned in a big way to the concept of branded interactive games with Elfmas Town.

The difference this time around? Facebook, which was only about 2 years old when the first self got elved in 2006. At that time the social network had less than 100 million members and in fact had only instituted open enrollment two months earlier. Today Facebook has more than 500 million members around the world, pretty evenly split between those under and over 35. And the habit of sharing likes to a news feed or Twitter feed that can be seen by one’s friends can certainly help boost viral spread.

That growth made it a very attractive channel in which to build Elfmas Town this year, says OfficeMax vice president of branding strategy Mark Andeer.

“We felt we already had the big holiday hit with ElfYourself, and we knew that our target consumer—women 25 to 54—is playing casual games a few times a week,” he says. Since they’re also logging into Facebook several times a week, the social network seemed the natural place to build an interactive gaming app that could also integrate the OfficeMax brand more forcefully.

Since ElfYourself animations are designed to be shared with friends, the brand’s presence on that site has traditionally been pretty light, on the assumption that fewer people would share their elf creations if they looked too blatantly like an OfficeMax ad. That remains true this year, with only one use of the OfficeMax logo on the ElfYourself home page and very small links to the main Web site and to a store locater.

But the games on the Elfmas Town Facebook app relate much more visibly to the OfficeMax brand. One of the five games, “Bouncing thru the Snow”, lets users send an elf on a bouncing ride on a huge ball of rubber bands, harking back to the chain’s popular “Rubber band Man” TV ads.

Players must like the Facebook site to play the games. Once in, they can earn rubber band reward points for their day’s game performance, which can then be exchanged in a Santa’s Workshop section for coupons that can be redeemed in-store for discounts on merchandise. Once a day, players can also select a gift from a “Holiday Grab Bag” and win prizes ranging from a rollerball pen to a digital camera—or 100 rubber band points. (Points are erased at the end of the day.)

“The Elfmas Town Facebook experience is more tightly integrated to a brand-building experience [than the ElfYourself microsite],” Andeer says, noting that the holiday buying season is second only to back-to-school shopping days as the chain’s most important revenue event. “We felt we needed to give consumers a good reason other than deals to come to our Facebook site, and with the Elfmas app we’re added that experiential value.”

OfficeMax has also added lots of Facebook fans over the last three months, Andeer says, through offering content such as teacher videos from its “Day Made Better” school promotion and photos and video from a sweepstakes to give away tickets from the Jonas Brothers 2010 tour. In fact, the OfficeMax Facebook page has grown from about 600 likes earlier this year to almost 56,000—a trend Adeer thinks Elfmas Town will do a lot to accelerate.

“We feel we have a lot of equity in the elves, and we want to own them for this holiday,” he says. “You think of elf, you think of holidays and OfficeMax, and it’s all good.” The elves will show up in store signage. A troupe of them also rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Nov. 23 and then hit the trading floor to demonstrate their dance moves.

The OfficeMax elves even had a float in this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and in fact the chain ran an SMS contest around that appearance. Entrants were asked to text PARADE from their mobile phones to short code 30364 before Thanksgiving Day. At 9 a.m. on the day of the parade, they were sent one question about the OfficeMax float. Those who replied with the correct answer were entered into a drawing for grand prize of a Disney World vacation for four or runner-up prizes of OfficeMax gift cards. The sweepstakes was administered by ePrize.

And the elves even got into the act early on Black Friday, making sure shoppers knew that OfficeMax stores would be open 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on that day. Users could text WAKEUP to the same short code and get an SMS reply asking for their desired call time and time zone. The elf wakeup offer was publicized in store circulars, on the OfficeMax Web site and in its Facebook and Twitter channels.

In a non-elvish holiday promotion, OfficeMax has released a “Holiday Party Bingo” Facebook app accessed on the Facebook Elfmas Town site. Users can create their event page on Facebook, customize the categories to include such distinctions as “Appetizer King”, “Most Elftastic” and “World’s Wildest Dancer”, and invite friends and colleagues to come to the page and make predictions for category winners. Visitors to the page can also receive a code giving the4m access to the party page via their iPhones.

During the party, visitors can upload photos from their phones to the Facebook page for the event and view all photos on the party bingo board. After the party’s done, they can view and tag the photos in a Facebook slide show, see the chosen winners in each category, and order a 2011 calendar featuring the winners and other party photos as a memento of the event.

The Holiday Party Bingo app was created by agency Rosetta in collaboration with OfficeMax’s mobile team.