It’s good to acknowledge an old campaign that worked and it’s ok to bring it back to life. Actually, sometimes it’s better than ok - it can be even more successful.

I applaud Office Max. Welcome Elf Yourself 2.0. Hopefully, the start of a Christmas Holiday tradition. I expect an Elf Yourself 3.0 next year and a 4.0 the year after that.

In 2006, the Elf Yourself microsite for Office Max was a big success bringing in 200 unique visitors per second and creating 8 new elves per second (according to viralblog.com and generating 36 million visits in just about 5 weeks for a small budget (Office Max created 20 microsites - one being Elf Yourself - for a budget of 3 traditional TV spots. Not to mention how much press time and consumer buzz this creative effort received. You can still find Elf Yourself 1.0 examples on Flicker and YouTube - even the Good Morning America crew created elves and don’t forget the ever hilarious farting elf.

To give you an idea of the extent of the success of Elf Yourself 1.0, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken generated 14 million visits in one year.

So, it’s 2007…
and, right in time for the 2007 Holiday season, Office Max launches Elf Yourself 2.0. I believe the one difference is that this time you can select multiple dancing elves. Exactly what my little sister decided to do with me, my mum, my grandmama and of course herself - click here to laugh your pants off…I’m the slow elf.

The aspect that I really appreciate about this effort it that it’s a fantastically fun and engaging consumer experience that I WANT to share with friends, family, strangers and it actually starts to shift my perception of the stogy and undifferentiated Office Max brand. I caught myself considering shopping at Office Max for a Holiday present. And trust me this is a store that normally would not even come remotely close to falling into my consideration set. I have very high standards - admittedly, a bit of a shopping experience and brand snob.

A couple recos for Office Max:
1) Make this an annual Holiday tradition. Make yourself part of our Holiday experience by providing us with an Elf Yourself version every year. Great way for a brand to become emotionally attached to a consumer during a highly emotional and transactional period of time.

2) Ever hear of Facebook, MySpace, iVillage, Social Networks? I’m missing the Facebook Elf Yourself 2.0 application for 2007. Missed opportunity to generate even more buzz and participation. I would keep an eye out in 2008 for the latest online environments that can help this effort have an even larger presence. Just remember not to force it and to keep it authentic. That’s one of the beauties of Elf Yourself.

Now, go spread the cheer and create your own elf.

advergirl has an interesting post (via AdRants) asking her readers for help in identifying what makes a Web 2.0 site. I personally like the way she’s broken down her examples into “Web 1.0″, “Web 2.0 in the raw” and “Web 2.0 by a brand.”

A newsletter sign-up form from our client, AARP, shows up as the Web 1.0 example for “Principle #6: From Accessible to Personal.” This intrigued me, so I delved into what I think makes the other examples personal:

Web 2.0 in the raw: NewsGator.com

NewsGator offers several different RSS aggregators for individuals and businesses, as well as syndication services for content providers. While I use Google Reader myself, I totally understand why advergirl chose NG to represent personalization. Instead of signing up for a single newsletter where the provider determines what I want to read a la AARP.com, I can subscribe to a myriad of RSS feeds and personalize the content to suit my tastes. (For the record, AARP.com offers RSS feeds in addition to email newsletters.)

Web 2.0 by a brand: Target.com

Target has a feature on its site called TargetLists that “lets you keep track of everything you want to give or get. You can create, find, organize and share lists for any person, any event or any occasion.” Sounds pretty similar to Amazon’s wish list service, but I like Target’s ability to bridge the gap between brick & mortar and online by allowing you to add items to your list while you’re in one of the stores.

Web 2.0 by a brand: Firefox.com

I conducted a little experiment a few months ago where I made Firefox the default browser on my Windows desktop at work. (At home, I only have Macs, save for the Windows notebook I need for work-related tasks, and Safari is normally my browser of choice.) And the result? Firefox is still my default browser on that machine — just not the out-of-the-box install of Firefox — thanks to being able to personalize the heck out of the browser.

One of the personalization features of the Firefox site is the Firefox Add-ons section. I can’t function in my day job without Internet Explorer, so my solution was to install IETab, which allows you to run IE’s rendering engine inside of Firefox. Quite cool, especially the ability to set up sites to automatically open in the IE engine.

Here’s a brief list of some of my other favorite Firefox Add-ons:

• FireBug — edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page
• Colorful Tabs — colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish
• FireFTP — a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client
• DownloadThemAll — a powerful yet easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox extension that adds new advanced download capabilities to your browser

Some of her other principles are equally as interesting, such as “1. From Finding Information to Making Connections” and “7. From Expert Voice to Peer Credibility,” but maybe I’ll save those comparisons for a later post.

M&M has been taking some bold moves into Web 2.0 over the pas 6 months.  Their first notable effort was to build out web-based system whereby I could customize a an M&M to look like me.  This effort was supported with traditional media.

The interface looked like this:

It was a little rough around the edges, but the system worked. 

Still, it never struck me as profound.  Frankly, people aren’t in love with the M&M guys to the point they want to be one.  Yes, they are huggable and edible, but I wouldn’t put them up there with Stay Puft Marshmellow Man.

My opinion was confirmed when this technology was applied to the Simpsons.  As part of their movie promotion, the Simpsons crew built out a similar system whereby you could create your own Simpsons character.  This was brilliant, and it played directly to what many of us have dreamed about at least once over the past 15-or-so years: getting a cameo on a Simpsons episode.

Since this battle of avatars, M&M has changed coarse.  Their newest campaign (I saw it on TV last night) is promoting a new web-based system whereby you can add custom text to M&Ms.

To me, this is much more on strategy.  I wrote a few months ago about another company, MyMuesli, that opened up their production model for mass customization. If M&Ms (and it’s ad agencies) want me to emotionally connect with the M&M brand - thus making it “my” brand for candy - then they need to let me make “my” bag of M&Ms.  Let me pick the colors, let me pick the type of chocolate (dark, light, white), let me pick the packaging and let me pick the text that will be written on the back of each thick candy shell. 

M&Ms still has a way to go with their system (you can see it for yourself here) as currently you can only choose two colors from their palate and the text comes in only one font, but they have taken the right approach.  To date, I know of no other food company with American presence that allows a customer to customize a product.  Unlike the avatar system, this is profound.

I went out and picked up a new copy of iLife this past weekend.  I’m not one to review softward, but the new iPhoto was a welcomed departure from the cumbersome version still found on most Macs today.  The new features are great - such as being able to view the photographs within a folder simply by dragging your cursor across that folder - but my overall impression is this version of iPhoto is more of an evolution than a revolution. Something seems to be missing.  You should definately see the online demo of iLife/iMovie/iPhoto for yourself.

Then today, after some inspiration from a friend who sent me the link to Philip’s new Drag & Draw, I began looking online for other software applications that could help me navigate my ever-growing list of photographs on Flickr, iPhoto, my cell phone, my work laptop, my laptop, my wife’s laptop, etc.

I came across this.  It is the first YouTube video that actually compelled me to raise my hand to my mouth in astonishment:

This is a photo revolution. Mr. Jobs, you still have some work to do.