Obviously this is a season of turmoil for a lot of marketing agencies both in and out of the digital space, with clients cutting back on spending and rejiggering their marketing mix. But even before the business climate headed south, small and mid-sized agencies had to contend with consolidation, the gradual commoditization of functions such as search marketing, and the need to expand their in-house expertise to keep up with brands’ more diverse needs.

So one difference I’ve noticed in this year’ flood of holiday e-greetings from agencies and platform providers is a growing tendency to use these annual contact points as agency promotions, using these touch points to emphasize the firm’s particular strengths and capabilities.

That’s the case with two holiday Web cards that I received recently. One is from OneUpWeb, which started life as a search marketing agency but has been steadily spreading into other related disciplines such as social marketing and campaign design. The card comes as a viral e-mail with audio and a link to www.NaughtyListed.com, an animated Web version of Santa’s North Pole complaint department, depicted as a decidedly low-rent operation staffed by two Sopranos extras as elves.

Visitors can nominate three friends to be put on the Naughty List by adding their names, e-mail addresses, specific complaints and an optional picture of their offenses. Those three offenders then get an e-mail from Santa that mentions their first name and shows their photo and the complaint against them.

The e-mail informs them that they can’t “clear their name with the Claus” until they nominate three more friends to the list. “If you don’t make it off the list before I check it twice, you can count on coal this Christmas,” Santa threatens. Those who rat out three friends get a red strike through their names, though it remains readable on the list.

The site can be forwarded to a friend, and it was also mentioned at its Dec. 9 launch in OneUpWeb’s highly read StraightUpSearch blog.

“The purpose behind the card—other than that it’s the holidays—is that the subscribers who are on our targeted list are connected with the marketing departments,” Lisa Wehr, preside and CEO of OneUpWeb. “We’re getting ready to go through a re-branding in the next couple of months. We’ve been providing other services such as social media marketing, banner ad placement, Web site usability and enhancement, for quite a while; but the world still views us as a search marketing company, which is where our roots are. So we wanted to use some humor to demonstrate our full talents.”

Changing clients’ perceptions of her firm is a pretty big challenge, Wehr says. “A large percentage of them have been with us for three to six years. When they signed on with us, we were just a search company, and it’s hard to alter that perspective and show them we’re more than that.”

Wehr says the take-up of the viral campaign has been strong, with thousands of visitors to the site. Three days before Christmas, there were about 500 names on the list, with about a quarter of those struck through.

Meanwhile Apptera, which provides in-call ads for mobile networks, has produced a short, interesting holiday game that leads users from e-mail to a Web site to a mobile component. Users click n a link within an e-mail and are taken to www.apptera.com/HolidayCard08/.

There they’re asked to help an unhappy little boy who can’t find his list for Santa. He asks them to look around his room while he searches downstairs. Users input their mobile number and within seconds get a call from the boy asking if they want to opt in to receive text message clues of places to search in the room.

The list is found on the third clue, of course, at which point the boy rushes in, happy again, and says as a thank you, someone will be calling shortly to poll the users on which of three charities should get a holiday donation of unspecified size. The voice call arrives and explains the options: Second Harvest Food Bank, Habitat for Humanity or JobTrain employment training. The charity that has received the most votes by January will get the money from Apptera.

It’s a cute little interactive amusement that manages to make you feel good inside of three or four minutes tops, assuming you’ve input your phone number directly. (You can also play the game by submitting a dummy number. ) you even get a thank-you SMS listing the charity you select, along with a link to dial the number for that non-profit, just in case you’re motivated to give a little on your own.

And most interestingly, it gets players to migrate pretty seamlessly among e-mail, the Web, mobile voice messages and SMS—something Apptera aims to do with its in-call voice and video ads, of course, deployed for clients such as MovieTickets.com and AOL Moviefone.

Last May Apptera reached callers phoning to check movie times for the superhero flick “Iron Man” with ad pitch for another comic-book movie opening the following month, the latest version of “The Incredible Hulk.” Callers could use their keypad to request a mobile alert before the “Hulk” debuted.