When Toy asked us to collaborate with them to develop a holiday viral campaign for OfficeMax, not many wish lists started, or even ended with office supply stores. The category name itself doesn¹t exactly elicit the same tinge of excitement normally associated with the Macy’s, Best Buys and Santa’s Workshops of the world. Fortunately for all of us, we found a way to change all that.
Like we do for many of our serious marketing challenges, we produced an incredibly
light-hearted solution, ElfYourself.com. The innovative, elf-laden site allowed users to upload faces of themselves, their friends and their family members and put them on cheerful dancing holiday elves to create customized ecards. A toll-free number even let users record a personalized elfin’ greeting.
The results were shocking. Users forwarded the cards to their loves ones, posted links on their blogs and social networking profiles; footage was recorded to YouTube; and during its rise as the quintessential holiday ecard, Elf Yourself was featured on morning, talk, news and sports shows across the country, resulting in 193 million visits and the elfamorphosis of over 123 million faces. OfficeMax saw a 190% increase to it’s web-traffic and a sustained a steady increase in online and walk-in sales.
This is one of my all time favourites websites. When this first came out everyone in the office gathered round the computer watching the elf myself christmas card – everyone was laughing – it was amazing, simple and clever. Even now I can’t help but smile looking at those funky little dances.
Man this is an excellent website, I love uploading my photo and having a fun time
Yearly tradition now 
We were having a lot of fun with this but why can’t a person enter the site now? Especially now that it is Christmas time?
i love this site its so funny lol!
[...] Get the Glass, Vodafone Future Vision, Audi R8, The Eco Zoo, We Choose the Moon, Philips Bodygroom, Elf Yourself, and countless others. Now, I’m betting this invites a few comments to the effect of “those [...]
[...] in 2000. Daniel has been behind some of the most viral campaigns in Internet history including “ElfYourself” for OfficeMax, “Ms. Dewey” for Microsoft and “Mind Freak” for A&E. Join Daniel on [...]
[...] in 2000. Daniel has been behind some of the most viral campaigns in Internet history including “ElfYourself” for OfficeMax, “Ms. Dewey” for Microsoft and “Mind Freak” for A&E. Join Daniel on [...]
[...] in 2000. Daniel has been behind some of the most viral campaigns in Internet history including “ElfYourself” for OfficeMax, “Ms. Dewey” for Microsoft and “Mind Freak” for A&E. Join Daniel on [...]
[...] in 2000. Daniel has been behind some of the most viral campaigns in Internet history including “ElfYourself” for OfficeMax, “Ms. Dewey” for Microsoft and “Mind Freak” for A&E. Join Daniel on [...]
[...] in 2000. Daniel has been behind some of the most viral campaigns in Internet history including “ElfYourself” for OfficeMax, “Ms. Dewey” for Microsoft and “Mind Freak” for A&E. Join Daniel on [...]
[...] in 2000. Daniel has been behind some of the most viral campaigns in Internet history including “ElfYourself” for OfficeMax, “Ms. Dewey” for Microsoft and “Mind Freak” for A&E. Join Daniel on [...]
[...] in 2000. Daniel has been behind some of the most viral campaigns in Internet history including “ElfYourself” for OfficeMax, “Ms. Dewey” for Microsoft and “Mind Freak” for A&E. Join Daniel on [...]
[...] in 2000. Daniel has been behind some of the most viral campaigns in Internet history including “ElfYourself” for OfficeMax, “Ms. Dewey” for Microsoft and “Mind Freak” for A&E. Join Daniel on [...]
[...] Get the Glass, Vodafone Future Vision, Audi R8, The Eco Zoo, We Choose the Moon, Philips Bodygroom, Elf Yourself, and countless others. These are the types of sites we use Flash for and that many of our ad [...]
[...] Elf Yourself [...]
[...] director and experienced digital marketer Jason Zada, the brain behind the highly successful “Elf Yourself” interactive campaign for Office [...]