The JibJab Blog

Stick Your Face In It!

A Heaping Helping of JibJab

While everyone is finding their inner elves via ElfYourself, we wanted to make sure that the new Thanksgiving art and animations our team designed for 2009 don’t go unnoticed! Last year we were so busy, we didn’t get to launch any postables, so we made up for it this year with some instant classics. From touchdown plays to familiar looking villagers, we think these Plymouth inspired postables would make profile pictures that rock!

In addition, at this very moment we’re launching a foot tapping 70’s inspired jam called Jive Turkey! It’s gravy, baby!

November 17, 2009
New Gifts Available!

The ElfYourself experience is rolling and we wanted to highlight some of the new gifts, available only in our ElfYourself store! Along with the usual greeting cards, mousepads and mugs, you now have the option to get your face on playing cards, ornaments and BLANKETS!

Of course, any new products we considered went through tons of testing. And that meant putting employee heads on early models of the blankets, creating abominations like this cozy clone comforter.

We have dozens of those test blankets hanging around. Too bad it doesn’t get freezing cold in Southern California. As the holidays approach make sure to get your orders in soon for the best pricing! Since these are created individually, it can take up to a week to manufacture and without premium shipping, up to an additional 14 days for the USPS to deliver. We would recommend ordering before December 3rd for the best rate, and before December 11th to make it in time for Christmas!

November 16, 2009
Famous Fan-Made JibJabs!

In today’s blog we wanted to feature one of the coolest uses of Starring You we’ve seen… celebrities retweeting and sharing fan-made JibJabs. Just because we think it’s awesome. So pardon us as we go from behind the scenes production blog to gossip rag, because cere are some celebrity endorsed Starring Yous that we’ve seen over the last few months!

Alyssa Milano got her Elf on yesterday, retweeting a fan-made ElfYourself featuring many-a-popular tweeter. This was thanks to JibJabber KittCameo who was on a roll tweeting out ElfYourself vids. He also nabbed a retweet from Nia Vardalos, of Greek Wedding and Life in Ruins fame, and had the peeps of Project Runway laughing!

Musicians have been huge as well… American Idol favorite Adam Lambert tweeted this fan-made Monster Mash with a laugh. Limp Bizkit header Fred Durst showed some love for the Chippendales by announcing this fan-made video to be the latest Limp Bizkit music video. Is there any higher honor?

Mrs. Kutcher herself, Demi Moore passed along some disco JibJab goodness from the twitter-verse… we completed the link here. Greg Grunberg of Heroes fame practically dared users to retweet his Chippendales dance, but he owed the original creation to a fan.

So what did we learn here? Well, there’s pretty much no better way to get some props from your favorite people then by sending them a video starring… themselves! Luckily for you, we have 5 ElfYourself videos waiting to be personalized.

November 13, 2009
How-To Starring You

One question we get quite often is “how do you make a Starring You video?”. It’s a simple process, but we found it kind of hard to sum up without visual accompaniment. While you can find instructions while making a video and additional information in our FAQ, we’ve decided to go another step and create a few tutorial videos for first-time JibJabbers.

Here is a tutorial for the new ElfYourself site…

And here is a tutorial for general JibJab Starring You videos on JibJab.com!

Enjoy!

November 12, 2009
Happy Veteran’s Day, JibJabbers! [UPDATE]

[UPDATE: Wohoo! Submissions are closed and we sent out over two dozen memberships to vets and active service members! Thanks everyone, and keep your eyes peeled for more giveaways on our Facebook and Twitter!]

To honor the amazing men and women who work hard to protect our freedom, we want to extend free 1 year JibJab Memberships to all active duty service members from all branches of the military. It’s the least we could do to thank those of you currently sacrificing so much so that we can live in a country that allows us make a living making things that make people laugh. To qualify, you must send an email to jibjabservicemembers (at) gmail (dot) com in the next 48 hours with the following information so that we can verify your active duty status:

First Name
Last Name
Branch of Military
Date of Birth

Please note that this offer is a Veteran’s Day special thank you and that the email above will only be valid for the next 48 hours.

Happy Veterans Day!

Yeah, this is a recycled image from back after the 2004 election but the sentiment still holds!

November 11, 2009
An Elf Invasion!

We’ve seen some great shout outs from friends and press since we launched ElfYourself 2009, and we’re so excited, we just had to share them!

TechCrunch had a leg up on the story and posted last night… it wasn’t long before Mashable got in the mix… we were lucky enough for CNN Money to run the press release… and CNET joined in the geeky fun with their own coverage!

But maybe most exciting of all, we had an appearance on Ellen today! You can see Ellen, her mom and co dancing ElfYourself style in her episode recap at the 2:40 mark. She credits her mom’s choreography 😀

What a whirlwind of a first day! We’re excited to get the word out about the elves… hopefully we can nab a trending topic on twitter soon 😉

November 10, 2009
The Elves Are Back!

Office Max and JibJab are excited to usher 2009’s ElfYourself experience in tonight! ElfYourself has some amazing stuff built in this year, and we’ll be going through all the fun things you can do on this blog over the next few weeks. Wait, why are you still reading this? Go on and ElfYourself!

November 9, 2009
Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock

A teaser is ticking away over on a certain website. They’re coming…

November 5, 2009
Stress Balls

We are in insane crunch mode right now as tech and art are wrapped for the holiday season. Nights are late, mornings are early and it can get pretty intense. So we started throwing these balls at each other. It’s cathartic! In fact, your blogger may have had a ball thrown at him after taking this photograph.

November 4, 2009
At the YouTube Roundtable

As amazing the Los Angeles area is for finding and working with talent, it isn’t known for being the hub of all things internet related. That distinction goes to the cities surrounding the San Francisco bay, and we are constantly traveling that way to attend conferences and discuss innovations in the online world so that we can harness new technologies. That’s why it was super awesome of YouTube to bring a huge chunk of their staff down the coast to Santa Monica today for the YouTube Roundtable, a discussion between YouTube and their partners.

We chatted it up with likes of Tay Zonday and that guy who started the Keyboard Cat trend, learning where YouTube plans to take things in the future. We’re most excited to start using YouTube as a community where people can share their Starring You videos. If you’ve never seen it, we’ve got an awesome collection of our favorite fan-made Starring Yous growing there. We search YouTube for new entries every week, but if we miss you, link to your upload and we’ll include it in the playlist!

Above, the guys from Wicked Awesome Films chat it up with Liam Kyle Sullivan.

November 3, 2009
The Best Way to Earn a Free Membership!

We were astounded to see the Monster Mash show up on news channels all over the country last week, but the best part is that we totally have our awesome community of JibJab fans to thank. JibJabbers took to tweeting and facebooking personalized Monster Mashes at and on the pages of local news teams and cable shows like Fox and Friends, giving the newscasters a little something to laugh about and scoring some major on-air time! As a little thank you, we’re tracking down the folks that submitted JibJabs to their favorite anchors and awarding them with free t-shirts and free memberships! @TnMe, you’re first for JibJabbing the folks of Fox and Friends!

As we hit the holiday season, try JibJabbing your favorite action news team. If it makes air, shoot us a note and we’ll shoot you a membership and a t-shirt!

November 2, 2009
JibJab or Treat

We got into the Halloween spirit at the office today, with costumes, candy and a bit of fun creative time drawing on gourds. You can see our collection below, and a few more of the pumpkins at Trish’s blog.

On a side note, we wanted to thank everyone who made the Monster Mash such a smash hit this Halloween. We’re skyrocketing at over 15 million Mashes watched as we blog, and can’t wait to see the grand tally once this Halloweekend is over. Rest assured, this is just a taste of the zany creative fun we have in store for the upcoming holiday season!

October 31, 2009
CNR Live On Jimmy Fallon!

For those of you who missed it last night, NBC has posted Al’s performance of CNR live on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon… featuring JibJab’s music video! This won’t be available forever, so check it out. Click here or on the image below to watch it on Hulu.

October 29, 2009
You Got Your JibJab in my Facebook!

Huzzah! We’ve been building up to this moment for months and now we’re happy to announce that JibJab pictures and videos have hit the Facebook Gift store, allowing the world to oh-so-easily post videos from our massive library to your friends Facebook walls on birthdays, holidays or whenever! You may have read about it last week in Wired or the New York Times, as Facebook rolled it out to small groups of their users at a time.

JibJab members will continue to get first word of new content as well as the ability to download and share via Facebook, while the Facebook option will be the best way to make one card or dance at a time using Facebook credits. In other words, JibJab.com is all you can eat, while Facebook will be one entrée at a time. Check Facebook’s FAQ and their blog for more information.

October 28, 2009
JibJabbing on Jimmy Fallon with Weird Al!

Tune into Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tomorrow, Wednesday the 28th and catch Weird Al Yankovic’s live performance of CNR! Its the first, or one of the first live performances of the song and we’re really excited to hear it, plus it doesn’t hurt that they’ll be playing the JibJab music video behind Al’s performance! Al is on air promoting his new album, The Essential Weird Al Yankovic, so don’t forget to pick that up as well!

October 27, 2009