ElfYourself 2008: 3 Days till ElfDay!

Image by xcaballe via Flickr

Just a year ago OfficeMax debuted its highly successful holiday hit website: ElfYourself.com.

ElfYourself.com was a promotional viral video with a twist – users could upload their own pictures and create dancing elves to send to family and friends as e-cards.

Sounds pretty simple, eh? That simple site got over 100 million unique visitors throughout the 2 month campaign.

Enter Greg Spiridellis, CEO of JibJab Media. He saw ElfYourself and saw some great potential. ElfYourself.com resonated with him because it matched some of the offerings of JibJab which also lets people personalize e-cards with their own images.

Spiridellis looked up ElfYourself’s traffic stats in Quantcast and saw the following:

In the one month that ElfYourself.com debuted and got hammered it rivaled facebook in traffic, which is pretty darn extraordinary. JibJab’s ceo thought they could do it a few bits better. In Februar Greg Spiridellis cold-called the chief marketing office of OfficeMax proposing a partnership.

Under the partnership JibJab would create new dancing elves around its ‘Starring You’ platform. JibJab is planning not one but three different dances including: Disco Elves, Country Elves, and Jazz Elves.

They are also planning on capitalizing on the opportunity to sell digital downloads of the videos, and printed images on cards, mugs, mousepads, and more.

Elfyourself.com could turn from an expensive marketing ploy into a huge money-maker. OfficeMax agreed to JibJab’s proposal and is scheduled to relaunch in about 3 days.

[Source: TechCrunch] Disclaimer: I’m in no way being compensated for this post it’s purely an interesting blog post – however if you work for OfficeMax and would like to compensate me by all means drop me a message.

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