Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [102]
Oh yeah. Reason number seven why I never started my own shop: jumping out of the comfortable job.
The comfortable jobs that Bologna, Dabill, and Merkin left were at Fallon New York, where Bologna was president and Merkin was creative director. Prior to his gig at Fallon, Merkin worked at the rapidly ascending and now flat-out big Miami shop Crispin Porter + Bogusky where he won numerous awards for his groundbreaking work for Mini Cooper, Truth Anti-Tobacco, and Ikea, for whom his “Lamp” commercial garnered a Grand Prix at Cannes.
“We all got along really well,” Bologna continued, “and we all began to realize that there was a better way to do things, and that being attached to a legacy agency wasn’t the answer. So, we’re financially independent, we get to choose our clients and say no to them if it’s a bad fit. It’s our philosophy that under those conditions, creativity can flourish.”
The abridged, PowerPoint-free version of “Elf Yourself, Part 1” is as follows.
In 2006, Bob Thacker, OfficeMax’s senior vice president of marketing and advertising, contacted Bologna with a seemingly modest assignment. He wanted to seed the idea to consumers that Office-Max, the number-three office supply chain behind Staples and Office Depot, was a viable holiday gift option. The only catch was that the production budget for the effort was less than the cost of the average thirty-second TV commercial (around $300,000).
So rather than creating one more commercial to throw into the network holiday din, Toy enlisted some of the best digital production companies around to produce twenty separate holiday Web sites that featured hours of OfficeMax-branded online content.
Nineteen of the mini-sites enjoyed modest success, but nothing like the level of action that came out of the Elf Yourself site. Created by Merkin and Jason Zada of the digital marketing firm EVB, Elf Yourself not only transcended the online genre; it transcended advertising and became the kind of cultural event that marketers dream of. Hosts of The Today Show and Good Morning America elfed themselves. The New York Times, CNN, and many others featured the site. And not only were millions of people elfing and forwarding greetings of themselves, but hundreds were uploading Elf Yourself videos onto YouTube. Bologna ran through some of the numbers for me. Half a billion hits and thirty-one million visitors in less than five weeks. When most Web marketers measure how long visitors spend on their site, they speak in terms of minutes. For Elf Yourself, Toy measured it in years. Bologna and company slipped this factoid into its OfficeMax case history: the total time spent online by Elf Yourself visitors was more than six hundred years.
From a creative standpoint, the aesthetic of the site was crude and basic, and the act of elfing was painfully simple. Plus, there was no overt brand message burned into the process. Yet people of every age embraced it. Most likely because, unlike so many online-marketing experiences, Elf was such a simple, joyful experience that people felt compelled to pass it along and share.
Just as was the case with Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, everyone wanted to know if all the online hype translated to an increase in holiday traffic. Online tracking services said that Office-Max’s brand awareness absolutely went up as a result. Thacker told Ad Age, “We were looking to build the brand, warm up our image. We weren’t looking for sales … [but were] trying to differentiate