Microsite.com

This past holiday season, you probably received an email from a co-worker who had “elfed” himself. I think we all did. In fact, I think every single breathing individual in the continental United States received a freakin’ email that linked him to the www.elfyourself.com Microsite for OfficeMax. Once at the site, we were treated to a co-worker’s head superimposed on an elf, doing, among other dances, the Maccerena. Good Lord, this was disturbing, but that’s besides the point. This thing went über-viral.

Elfing was everywhere throughout December. It even led off a Good Morning America segment, which you can still see on YouTube. (Yes, it’s official, GMA is utterly worthless.)

My point, however, is not how just plain eerily strange and grotesque the Elfing concept was. (Have you seen Sadaam Hussein as the dancing elf?)

Or the fact it became the number one Microsite of all time. (The Microsite experienced 36 million visits in about five weeks, according to Media Temple, the hosting company for the site. This means on average 10 people per second were “elfing” themselves. By comparison, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken Microsite had 14 million visitors throughout all 2006.)

My point is that it worked. I think. OfficeMax hasn’t posted official sales for Q4 yet. But Ad Age quotes Mark Andeer, VP-brand strategy, that holiday online traffic was up 20% and store sales were also up.

Then AP published last week, “OfficeMax reports higher sales during the holiday season. OfficeMax Inc., the nation’s No. 3 office supplies retailer, turned things around in 2006, and investors responded by buying shares doubling their value over the year.”

By February 7, 2007 the stock priced reached a 52-week high. And I got to believe the institutional investors know how same-store sales did during the holidays. If sales would have sucked, the stock wouldn’t be skyrocketing.

Now, was it all attributable to the Microsite? Of course not, but – and here’s a really important point – OfficeMax’s Microsite strategy (it launched 20 sites altogether during December) replaced its traditional TV advertising strategy! According to the same Ad Age article, OfficeMax shifted all of its money out of its TV budget.

So instead of spending millions on TV media and production budgets, OfficeMax spent a tenth of that and created the Microsite, then did (from what I can tell) the following:

1. In early December it posted a link on its main website driving traffic to another page promoting all 20 Microsites

2. Then on December 4, it issued a press release stating, “What could spread holiday cheer faster than sending your mother a custom-choreographed North Pole Dancing Santa personalized with your face or a personally-carved Virtual Ice Sculpture shaped by a chainsaw to your officemate across the hall? OfficeMax, a leader in office products and services, announces the simultaneous launch of 20 new holiday-themed Web sites with games and video to help celebrate the season by sharing cutting-edge digital entertainment with friends and family.”

3. It then advertised on “VH1 Best Week Ever website”

4. It paid for a Google keyword campaign for “elfyourself”

That’s it. The rest, I guess, is history… Thank, God.

Postscript: When you go to the Microsite now, it’s just a landing page with a little yellow tag linking to OfficeMax’s main site. Odd. So, you have millions of visitors coming back to see a round 2, and you deliver nothing? Really? Isn’t that kind of a, oh, I don’t know, a huge freakin’ wasted opportunity?