Complex-Hosting Powers Dancing Elves (elfyourself) and 19 other “gifts”
OfficeMax, EVB (a long time partner) and Toy hooked up with (mt) to bring you the online holiday e-tainment event of 2006 with 36 Million “elf’ings” and 300 million total minutes of holiday fun. Office Max commissioned Toy and 8 interactive companies to create 20 mini sites that engaged users in fun holiday games like Dont Shoot Your Eye Out, Save The Snowman and the most famed, Elf Yourself (which is unfortunately offline).
Elf Yourself was far and away the monster hit; which proves that the genius who cultivated the elfish character knew what he was doing. To “elf yourself,” 36 million of you already know so bear with us, you uploaded a head shot of yourself to the site, which was then placed on the body of a dancing elf. For additional kicks, you could call a toll free number and leave a message for your new elf character which was then transformed into an elf voice. Then you’d email this to your friends and be famous as an elf on the internet!
This promotion brought much joy and mirth to millions this holiday season. Coverage on CNN, Vh1, Good Morning America, Various newspapers and a gazillion blogs threw more fuel on the e-fire. On the back end, the complex hosting team at (mt) was working like; well like elves in December to keep everyone merrily elfing. Their experience paid off as we quickly moved elfyourself off the Dedicated Virtual server that housed the collection of mini sites and on to a custom made Complex Hosting solution. From then on it was smooth sailing into the record books…
Elfyourself broke some records here at (mt) Media Temple. The stats are:
– Number of unique visitors per day: 1,290,330
– Estimated total number of “elfings”: 36 Million
– Average length of visitor: 15 minutes
– Megabits per second: 650mb
– Terabytes transferred: 55+TB
– Number of required CPU cores: 16
– 79,000 MySpace hits and 2 million Google queries for elfyourself
– People spent 300 million minutes on all 20 OfficeMax® campaign sites
For more details, check our press release.
Adage has a great recap as well: Eat That, Subservient Chicken: OfficeMax ElfYourself Site Draws 36 Million
