Everyone can point to disappointing sequels that failed to re-capture the excitement of the original: “Fantasia 2000”. “The Two Jakes”. “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”. When you’re creating a product for popular culture, it’s just hard to put that second bottle of lightning up on the shelf.

Apparently Office Max and the agencies behind the “Elf Yourself” viral campaign haven’t heard about the sophomore slump. The team scored a big holiday 2006 viral success with the campaign, in which users get to download their face to a spindly elfin body and then shake their groove thing for e-mail friends. So when the holiday season rolled around again in 2007, OfficeMax, ad agency Toy New York and digital content company EVB decided to up the ante to four elves per e-mail and add some showier dance moves and voice capability but essentially keep the rest of the campaign the same.

Office Max

The result: While “Elf Yourself” garnered 36 million site visits during the five holiday weeks of 2006 and saw 11 million elves created, last holiday’s “Elf Yourself” 2.0 earned 193 million Web visits and users created 123 million e-mail messages. True, the campaign ran a week longer the second time around. But that longer run can’t by itself explain why users, who spent a combined total of 600 years on the site in 2006, devoted a combined 2,600 years of time to it the following year.

That kind of response isn’t viral: it’s epidemic.

“When we realized we were going to bring back ‘Elf Yourself’ for 2007, we sat back and asked ourselves what we should add to it,” says Anne Bologna, founding partner and president of Toy. “We already had a large response asking to be able to ‘elf’ more people—so we gave the people what they wanted.”

At least they had that kind of guidance this year. But when they first launched the elf campaign in 2006, neither OfficeMax nor Toy nor EVB had any notion that the e-mail game was going to prove to be the huge it did. In fact, Toy and EVB originally launched “Elf Yourself” as part of a portfolio of 20 games and features designed to engage Web visitors.

“If you do 20 games, you figure one of them is going to be a breakout hit, and we all had our guesses about which one that would be,” Bologna says. “But nobody predicted it would be as big as it’s gotten.” She points out that at the height of its traffic this past holiday, one in every 100 users logged onto the global Internet was on the “Elf Yourself” Web site.

“That made this bigger than e-commerce Web sites from vendors like Target,” she says. “That’s not viral marketing—it’s an interactive phenomenon.”

One thing observers questioned about last year’s campaign, even in light of its viral spread, was the amount of branding benefit Office Max was getting from that success. Bologna can’t help with that, because the creators didn’t measure the brand lift from last year’s “Elf Yourself”.

However, the agency did pre- and post-campaign awareness polling this second time around. The number who identified the campaign with Office Max was “significant”, she said. “The client will be very pleased.”

Office Max is re-inventing its brand, Bologna adds, and wants to represent passion, fun and innovation to its shoppers. “That clearly ties in with a campaign like this, which frankly you wouldn’t expect from an office-supply brand.”

While there’s no guarantee that Office Max will opt to haul out any form of elving—single, multiple, or Mormon Tabernacle Choir-sized—for the next holiday, Bologna says the growth in impact that the game saw this last time might convince the client that they’ve got hold of a holiday franchise here.

“It’s a lot like Starbuck’s red coffee cup,” she says. “It’s a holiday tradition that you actually look forward to once a year. And to me that’s the best kind of branded entertainment.”

Jason Zada, executive creative director of San Francisco-based EVB, the digital agency that executed the “Elf” platform for Toy and Office Max, says that the initial success of the campaign in 2006 inspired a number of “upload your face” imitators during the year—many with more whiz-bang technology.

“One thing that ‘Elf Yourself’ has shown is that a viral campaign doesn’t need to be overly complicated, with fancy new technology,” he says. “It only needs to be easy and relevant. I think that’s one reason this has been so successful—because it’s fun and simple and runs during a time when people want to reach out and have contact with their friends and family.”