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Matching entries from B.L. Ochman's blog
Elf Yourself returns - but where are the rest of the fun holiday sites?
Send your own ElfYourself eCards OfficeMax and Jib Jab have teamed up for the latest edition of the Internet holiday phenomenon, Elf Yourself. The site lets you affix your head, and the heads of up to four other people, etc, to dancing elves. There are several new dances this year, plus easy integration with Facebook and Twitter. If you really love the video and want to save it, you can download it for $4.99. Started in 2006, ElfYourself received a then-amazing 36 million views in its first year. In 2007, it went wildy viral, with 193 million views. Views dropped off dramatically In 2008, when OfficeMax first teamed with JibJab. who required - for the first time - that users to register in order to share their videos. While traffic was down, Jib Jab's email list, which fuels its other promotions, grew substantially. This year, registration is not required, and that's likely to drive the virality of what has become an Internet tradition. The technology is substantially improved, and there's no longer any clunkyness to the process, which still takes a few minutes to complete. Continuing Elf Yourself is smart strategy Updating and improving Elfing opportunities is smart strategy on...
Can You Guess Which Pitch is a Real Viral? Agencies Can't!
Send your own ElfYourself eCards Dear social media gurus, advertising agencies and PR flacks: You need to read this post. I got three email pitches yesterday about new viral marketing campaigns. One was from an agency that said it “provides complete viral services”. Another was for “a brand new IBM (Lotus Foundations) viral video campaign” that will launch on Monday. (Hint: a campaign that has not launched yet is not viral.) And the third was from a friend, who saw something she thought I’d love and forwarded me a link. Guess which one was actually a viral? Apparently most agencies can't. First let’s define viral marketing: content passed from one person to another, including images, videos, links, applications, games, stories, emails, documents or virtually any other type of digital content that one person passes to another via email, IM, text messaging, or social network like Twitter, Friend Feed, etc or content sharing sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. What doesn’t make a campaign go viral: o sending out a press release about your latest viral o an email that says “this is a viral campaign”. What kind of creative is likely to go viral? o Knockout creative that's funny, shocking,...
Dear 3M and OfficeMax: What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
OfficeMax has run some fascinating ad campaigns over the past couple of years and I admire the the work of its agency, The Escape Pod. I also love the company's willingness to try weird ideas, like Get Elfed and my fave, the Tul pen campaign. OfficeMax just launched a brilliant Post-It Notes campaign, and that brings focus back the truly ridiculous battle 3M, maker of Post-its, got into with a guy named Scott Abelman. (He's right, they're wrong.) Dear 3M and OfficeMax - what you have here is a failure to communicate. Having consulted to massive companies ranging from IBM to Ford Motors, to McGraw-Hill, Cendant, etc, I know that many times, divisions in the same company simply don't talk to each other. And often, different divisions have different agencies, none of whom have the opportunity to consult with, or even meet, the others. Some clients are downright secretive, and others just don't take the advice they pay for. Some variation of that has got to be what's happened between 3M and OfficeMax. With all this clever Post-it marketing going on, Michelle Gebbie, eMarketing Supervisor of 3M Office Supplies Division, got in a public tussle with Abelman, who works for...
Dear Agencies: You Can't Control the Message, Get Over It!
Sometimes, the conversation in comments about a post shouldn't be left below the folds. This is one of them. I praised the the terrific OfficeMax Penny Pranks campaign, but called out the agency because the headline of each video begins "HILARIOUS HIDDEN CAMERA PENNY PRANK" and that's heavy-handed. Vinny Warren, creative director at The Escape Pod, the agency that created the campaign wrote in comments "... when you're fighting for clicks on youtube you find that subtlety is what closes on saturday night. you have become a programmer, not an advertiser. so funny becomes HILARIOUS. and interesting becomes FASCINATING. And that used to be true. You can't dictate what people will find funny by labeling it "hilarious". People have brains and are smart enough to figure out what they like without being hit over the head. Labels like "hilarious video" or "viral video" that are not created by viewers are bogus. You don't tell us what's hilarious or viral. We tell you. Escape Pod did a great job on the campaign. People are talking: the videos have already had more than two million views. But it's not because the word hilarious is in the headline. It's the content and the...
Hilarious, the New Hype Word of the Week?
Ad agency hype word of the moment - "hilarious" - rears its head in an email pitch from Cornerstone, whose own home page is a disaster. They're the agency promoting the new HBO animated series, "The Life and Times of Tim", premiering September 28th. Just yesterday, the agency for OfficeMax called its videos for the new Penny Pranks Campaign "hilarious." And today, in comments on my post about Penny Pranks, someone from that agency defended the use of the word as an SEO technique. Umm, nope, that won't help. The "Tim" series is created by Steve Dildarian - the Clio-winning ad man behind Budweiser's 'Lizards' campaign. It follows an everyday working guy from one awkward moment in his life to the next. The preview videos don't seem exactly hilarious, but it does look like Tim might be good, snarky fun....
OfficeMax Penny Pranks: a Funny Viral WannaBe That Actually Might Sell Something
OfficeMax, who, for the past two years has brought you the very weird and silly ElfYourself campaign, is back with Penny Pranks, in which red-haired comedian Matt McCarthy runs around New York City trying to use truckloads of pennies to pay for everything from diamond rings and steak dinners to horse-drawn carriage rides through Central Park. Just about nobody will take the pennies and just about everyone gets pissed at him. He can't even give pennies away on the street. OfficeMax claims that the very strange Elf Yourself , site has had 65 million visits, during which 35 elves were created per second. Has that sold any office supplies? Dunno. Since the Penny Prank campaign is tied into a back-to-school items for pennies campaign in OfficeMax stores, this campaign might actually drive traffic and sales to the site. And as someone who has refused Susan B. Anthony coins in change, it's easy to appreciate the humor. The heavy hand of an ad agency mars an otherwise fun campaign with the "HILARIOUS HIDDEN CAMERA PENNY PRANK" headline on every YouTube video in the campaign. Dear OfficeMax: Knowing when to shut up is often the better part of creativity. And I...
Go Get Elfed
I've been elfed by OfficeMax, the folks who brought you the Tul Pen handwriting analyst, Dr. Gerard Ackerman. (The elf takes a while to load, but it's worth the wait.) My elf dances and talks and so will yours. It's a holiday gift from OfficeMax...
Dr Gerard Ackerman Analyzes My Handwriting - For Real
As promised, my old buddy, Dr Gerard Ackerman, sent me an individual hand-writing analysis based on the handwriting sample I emailed him the other day. I am, he says, "calm, independent, yet practical and cautious...expansive, uninhibited, gregarious, generous -- this is an amazing sample. I don't know how to tell you this, but I think I love you." Unless only 10 people send TUL their handwriting, Dr. A certainly can't do this for everyone. But I'm happy he did mine. It's big fun. Dear DDB: You need to hire me to help you make this campaign stickier. Let's start with "win a date with Dr. Ackerman." Dear Gerard: I love you too....
Dr Ackerman's Personal Response
Click to Play Dr. Gerard Ackrerman, the noted graphologist featured in the new OfficeMax Tul Pen interactive campaign, made me this personal video response to the phone message I left him. He apologized for not calling back as his site promises, and asked me to email him a sample of my handwriting so he could do a personal analysis.In the message I reminded him that I am an alumnus of Pfingsten College, the college he lists on his CV. So he says he remembers me doing the savoy lindy hop up and down the halls at all hours at our alma mater, which shows that someone bothered to read enough about me to know I love to Lindy Hop."I wouldn't want this to get out," he says "but some of the analyses are being done in India, and I want to "do right by you" because I always felt bad about the way things ended between us. And "Go Troubadors!" Someone over there has a sense of humor that had me laughing out loud. I take back all the bad things I said about your campaign. :>) In a separate email, he tells me "It also seems you have had...
OfficeMax Launches Droll Interactive Campaign to Sell Pens
OfficeMax has launched an elaborate, and undoubtedly expensive interactive campaign featuring "graphologist" Dr. Gerard Ackerman to launch OfficeMax’s new private label design pen brand, TUL. It's created by DDB Advertising-Chicago and the heavy hand of ad agency cluelessness is evident. The very nice, and intensely cheery PR person told me the campaign is "hilarious" "amazing" and "a hoot." It's definitely funny, and I laughed out loud when Dr. Ackerman told me he loves me. I didn't feel compelled to pass on the URL to friends, but I did think it was fun. If I am ever in an Office Max store and see a Tul pen, I'll certainly look at it. But there are many missed opportunities in this campaign, like feedback from participants on how accurate they find the readings. All in all, it's an amusing old-fashioned push message with a couple of new media bells and whistles....
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