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In addition to the OfficeMax account, Toy was doing work for the Oxygen network, including a promotion for the Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency program that included a faux downtown New York City modeling agency storefront, replete with a window poster that read: “Now hiring beautiful people.” They’ve also helped launch the wireless reading device the Amazon Kindle and recently landed the BusinessWeek magazine account. Bologna also mentioned a top secret project with YouTube (which I found intriguing, if only because I was curious what the future of advertising needed an agency for*) and a recent meeting about an online-content project with Ashton Kutcher.

Rather than expending so much energy saying that they aren’t an ad agency, I thought, they just needed to say, “We created the Elf, we did branding for the world’s largest viral-video network, and we broke bread with Demi Moore’s boy toy,” and people would fill in the blanks.

The primary reason I came to Toy was to find out how Merkin and Bologna were going to follow up the radical success of Elf Yourself. The first year the assignment was very much under the radar, and there had been minimal expectations. But this year there were colossal expectations, from the CEO of OfficeMax, who had now decided to become more intimately involved in the process; from the OfficeMax employees who had proudly claimed ownership of and promoted the first round of work; and from the trade press. Plus, one year earlier, that type of online campaign was fairly novel. By the time the holiday season of 2007 rolled around, everyone was playing in the viral realm, many doing shamelessly derivative knockoffs of the Elf Yourself site.

Toy’s answer to the pressure wasn’t to do more, bigger, and/or better. First, it decided to do not twenty sites but one. And that one, again cocreated with EVB, was a slightly modified version of Elf Yourself. To some that may seem like the definition of playing it safe, but I thought it was ballsy, a rare demonstration of restraint in the excess-driven, egomaniacal world of advertising. The most significant change to the site seemed to be the introduction of additional elves.

In March 2008, I went back to Toy for an early-morning update, and to discuss the results of Elf Yourself year two. When I got off the elevator, there still wasn’t a lobby, or a receptionist. Window washers were climbing over desks on the Twenty-third Street side of the space, to gain better position to squeegee more light into the idea factory. Dabill was joking with one of the squeegee men, and nearby Merkin had his head down and was writing feverishly.

Toy, an agency founded on the premise that a great toy is one that inspires you and compels you to share it with others, and that brands need to engage your imagination and be as exciting as a new toy, was now two years old. Bologna came out of the kitchen area and waved for me to join her at the conference table. I asked how business was, and she said the phone doesn’t stop ringing. Then I thought about our first conversation and her thoughts about large agencies bound to selling TV and answering to shareholders and having beasts to feed.

“What if you get so popular you start to become the type of place that you used to work at, you know, numbers to meet, people to keep busy?”

She looked around, shook her head, and said, “That’s not gonna happen.”

Then we got down to talking Elf stats.

According to Nielsen Online Strategic Services, nearly one in ten Americans visited the OfficeMax Elf Yourself site, up nearly tenfold from its first year in existence. Blog pass-along posts, according to Nielsen, were also huge, and of the twenty most common search terms in the four weeks of December, six included the word “OfficeMax.”

According to OfficeMax, 193 million people visited elfyourself.com in year two, creating more than 122 million elves while spending more than a total of twenty-six hundred years on the site. For those still wondering what holiday elves have to do with office supplies, OfficeMax