Customer Value

ElfYourself and the OfficeMax Brand

During the 2006 holiday season, OfficeMax created a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon with the introduction of our ElfYourself™ holiday greeting Web site. The ElfYourself site enables visitors to upload facial photos and record a synchronized message through a special toll-free phone number. The face is then attached to an animated elf body, the voice is processed to sound “elf-like,” and the result is a dancing and talking character that can be forwarded to family or friends, or posted to personal Web sites or blogs.

During the five-week 2006 campaign, 36 million visitors created 11 million elf characters, prompting marketing pundits to deem it one of the most successful viral holiday campaigns ever.

The 2007 ElfYourself campaign, however, shattered even those impressive records, with 193 million visits and the creation of more than 123 million elf characters. It is estimated that at the height of the five-week 2007 campaign, 52 elf characters were being created every second, and that visitors had spent a cumulative total of 2,431 years on ElfYourself.com. The 2007 site offered enhanced features, including the ability to create up to four elf characters per message, which accounts for some of the additional characters created in 2007. We also introduced a similar site, ScroogeYourself.com, which provided visitors with the option of creating a character who did not necessarily share the elves’ holiday spirit. The ScroogeYourself site attracted 4.5 million visitors, generating 2.6 million characters.

While the original purpose of the site was simply to entertain customers and other visitors, both OfficeMax and our customers realized considerable value from the campaign. Customers had access to a free, fun and easy way to send holiday greetings, promote events, send holiday party invitations, and spice up their own Web pages. And, since the ElfYourself messages are delivered electronically, they avoid the environmental impacts of greeting cards and invitations that are printed and mailed.

OfficeMax benefited from an enormous amount of publicity and from improved perceptions of the OfficeMax brand.

The popularity of ElfYourself.com and ScroogeYourself.com began primarily on personal blogs, and then spread to industry blogs and social networks like Flickr, Digg and Facebook, followed by mainstream media coverage in USA Today, ABC World News Now and CNN American Morning.

Immediately following the 2007 holiday season, OfficeMax conducted a brand perception study to measure the impact of ElfYourself. The survey, which polled a statistically valid sample of respondents, concluded that approximately one-third reported that their experience with ElfYourself influenced their decision to visit OfficeMax and improved their perception of our company.