(Click here to buy The Next Evolution of Marketing with a portion of proceeds to go to one of our featured case studies, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America.)

Right about now, the first of several hundred people on the client and partner list of our digital advertising agency, Bridge Worldwide, are finding this man on the cover of a holiday card. Don’t be afraid, dear readers; it’s just Mike Glisson, one of our Tech stars—and for a special few weeks of shopping season, a helpful help. Welcome to the Bridge Worldwide Holiday Card, 2009 edition. I’m happy to share a pretty fun and useful example of Marketing with Meaning from the agency that spawned this concept.

Every year agencies and vendors around the world are challenged to figure out how to say “thank you” to their customers and partners for another mutually beneficial year. I remember coming to Bridge Worldwide in October 2004 and being handed this responsibility along with many others, and somehow it has stuck with me. Historically agencies loaded their clients with personal gifts and presents, but around 2004 we started getting letters from the Purchasing Departments of our clients warning us that anything more than a small, agency-branded trinket was taboo. So we had to figure out other ways to show how much we cared.

For the past five years, we have taken the opportunity to entertain our clients, share more about ourselves, and give back to good causes. We have made donations to the food bank on behalf of clients, we have shared families’ secret recipes, and we even created a video game with key employees as avatars. More or less, these were all solid examples of Marketing with Meaning, but the bar keeps going up every year.

Our teams also love to use the Holiday Card as a way to test out and impress our partners with kick-ass digital creative. Different teams take turns working on this project, and each one wants to one-up the previous effort thanks to our friendly competitive nature.

But this year’s challenge was set at a higher level for a few reasons. First, we just launched our manifesto book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, so we knew that all eyes would be on Bridge Worldwide to practice the meaningful marketing that it has been preaching. Second, we were extremely time-constrained thanks to a huge surge in new business from both historic clients and new wins throughout the year. In an economy that has hurt many other agencies, we have been lucky enough to keep growing at a torrid rate. But that didn’t leave a lot of time for company marketing efforts such as a Holiday Card.

Despite these challenges (or perhaps because of them), our team responsible for this project pulled together a killer idea in record time. I gave them a pretty simple brief, which essentially asked them to: (1) show off our unique Bridge Worldwide culture; and (2) provide Marketing with Meaning. The team actually came up with four great ideas, but I fell in love with Elf Worldwide….

Elf Worldwide is a service in which our own employees are providing gift suggestions to our clients and partners who are in need of help to come up with ideas for their loved ones. We realized that this can be a challenge for many people, especially when there are generation or interest gaps. And we saw an opportunity to tap one of our greatest strengths: a large, diverse group of employees who represent just about every age and interest group. As you can see on our website, it takes only seconds to request a gift idea from our group of volunteer elves. What you cannot see is that there is a pretty sophisticated series of steps that each request goes through (including prioritization of client requests and multiple checks for appropriateness!). The team thought of everything that could go wrong and planned accordingly.

Of course we couldn’t just offer this tool in a plain brown wrapper. Our team took over a corner of the office for a day and filmed hours of elf hijinks. The security-cam video on the home page actually has more than 30 minutes of unique footage and you just might find yourself unable to turn away. I also believe the site has some of the funniest copywriting we’ve ever produced as an agency.

As you might expect, we’re also using this tool as a way to make sure that people have put our book on the shopping list for that special marketer in their lives. The icing on the cake is that we are partnering with one of the featured meaningful marketers profiled in the book, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. A percentage of each book sold through this special link will go toward the partnership.

I don’t say this every year, but I really do believe this is our best Holiday Card effort yet. Let me publicly thank the entire team that put this together. Great work!

Go ahead and give it a try and let us know what you think!