Successful Agency Holiday Card Gets MarketingSherpa Post Analysis

While this last holiday season generated an inordinate amount of agency holiday cards filled with the usual inside humor, self-effacing irony (does that make any sense) and kitsch quotient, one never thought a simple agency holiday card would merit the attention of uber-marketing site MarketingSherpa (open access until Jan. 15) but one agency cracked through the barrier. Enlighten, whose card, called Holiday Party Excuse Generator, gave visitors a means to gracefully back out of attending the overbearing plethora of industry holiday parties generated 50,000 visitors who sent 20,000 email excuses, got named Macromedia Site of the Day, received loads of press attention and helped grow traffic to the agency's site 400 percent with visitors who spent 75 percent more time on the site than usual.

Not bad. Not bad at all for what used to be a last minute, let-the-interns-do-it, love-the-client endeavor. And, to boot, not bad at all having the work analyzed and featured in front of 150,000 marketing and advertising professionals courtesy of MarketingSherpa. It seems the Holiday card will now become the new agency self-promo.