OfficeMax Justifies Reuse of Elf Yourself Campaign ... with Quantitative Figures!

Here's a crazy notion -- demonstrating the success of your online "viral" with real-live numbers. Vague claims of "brand resonance" be damned!

For its uber-creepy Elf Yourself campaign -- enjoying a souped-up second year run -- OfficeMax has listed the following figures that (maybe?) demonstrate its success.

- ElfYourself.com has served over 65 million visitors thus far

- Over 41 million elves have been made since mid-November*

- 35 new elves are created per second

- The average time people spend on Elf Yourself is equivalent to 800 years (based on total site visits times average time per visit)

We love that last figure because it's exactly the kind of thing we used to say when we conducted marketing for a dot-com in a previous life: "Teens have spent the equivalent of 600 years on our website!"

What does that even mean?

In any case, if OfficeMax's purpose was to proliferate global tolerance for elves, it is clearly succeeding. We have no idea what the site has done for its bottom line, though.

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* This year Elf Yourself has a "group elf" creation feature, where one user can hypothetically make elves out of all his family and friends. We're guessing each of these group elves counts as one new birth.