Not-So-Silent Bob: OfficeMax’s Marketing Guru

Bob Thacker is an interesting guy. The SVP-Marketing for OfficeMax brought (American architect and designer) Michael Graves to Target, and years later commissioned, “ElfYourself.com.”  I recently had the pleasure of hearing him speak in Minneapolis with a presentation titled “Chewing Gum and Bailing Wire” (a metaphor for creating great things on a tight budget).

OfficeMax is not the easiest company to market. Most people’s idea of the perfect office supply-buying experience is to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible, while spending the least amount of money. Is buying office supplies fun?  Is it an emotional buying experience? Do office supplies touch your heart?

No…but that doesn’t mean their marketing couldn’t do all of those things.

Thacker’s mantra is this: “If you don’t have big bucks, you’d better have big ideas.”

In 2006 while challenged by his company to increase holiday sales, Thacker and his agencies were faced with trying to make OfficeMax into a destination for gifts (in addition to customer’s regular office purchases). But how do you take a largely imageless company with little connection to holiday shopping and make it relevant? 

Thacker and his co-agencies, Toy NY, took a $400,000 holiday budget and did something completely off the wall—they created 20 holiday-themed websites.  It was a huge risk, especially since the websites would not be heavily marketed themselves. Some of those 20 never got much traffic—sites like “roastaturkey.com” (where you actually watched a turkey roasting in the oven) and “reindeerarmwrestling.com” (use your imagination). 

But one of those 20 sites turned out to be “ElfYourself.com.”  At ElfYourself.com, you could upload photos of yourself and co-workers/friends onto the dancing bodies of elves—creating a nice holiday e-card.

Somehow people found that site and shared it through personal and business blogs;  and then to monster sites like Flickr, Digg, and Facebook. The traffic continued to mushroom until it reached every major network’s news. USA Today, ABC, CNN, The Today Show, and the CBS Early Show all reported on the novelty of a site largely created without any marketing plan.

How successful was it?  The first year, 2006 (again, this is roughly a $20,000 website) the site had 36 million visits, and got national exposure.

The site was brought back by OfficeMax in 2007 (Duh!), and did even more phenomenal numbers: 193 million visits by 122 million people. With an average of 15 minutes per visit, a combined 2600 years were spent on the site. 1 in 10 Americans visited the site…and more than 1/3 of those who visited ElfYourself claimed that the site influenced their holiday buying decisions.

The site again had impressive success in 2008, improving again vs. the previous year’s totals.

Over the site’s three years, the total value of the impressions created by this site is over $13 million dollars.

Thanks to the success of the site, OfficeMax is now seen by many as part of their regular holiday routine.

Thacker included that your advertising in 2009 must make the viewer do one of these things:
• Smile
• Laugh
• Be Inspired
• Touch Their Heart

Despite the additional options available to marketers now, it’s still a business all about great ideas and taking risks. Create something people will talk about.
You can see Bob Thacker’s presentation here.