World of Warcraft | Horn of Gathering
Blizzard Entertainment
Issue 58 | March 2021
Agency
72andSunny Los Angeles
Creative Team
Group Creative Director Tim Wolfe Sr. Designer Ryan Dols Sr. Writer Natalie Warther
Production Team
Production Head of Production Kate Morrison Executive Film Producer Zeynep Taslica Producers Zeynep Taslica, Grace Jensen Production Company Raucous
Other Credits
Brand Director Will Nader Sr. Brand Manager James Burton Brand Strategist Kira Carl Sr. Social Strategist Matt Augustin Client Head of Global Marketing Todd Harvey EP & Vice President WoW John Hight VP of Marketing Jorge Calleja VP, Global Consumer Marketing Matt Small Brand Director, Global Publishing Kevin Carter
Date
November 2020
Background
When Blizzard set out to launch World of Warcraft's latest expansion, Shadowlands, they saw an opportunity to reach a new breed of fans and gamers, who might have previously overlooked the 16-year old franchise.
Idea
To reach eager new players on social media, Blizzard employed a cutting edge piece of modern technology….a horn. The Horn of Gathering to be exact. A giant, mediaevallooking horn was made for unexpected celebrities around the world to sound, calling new players into WoW: Shadowlands.
Over the course of one day on Instagram, each celeb passed the rallying cry from one social account to another, until the swell of excitement had passed through 14 high profile accounts, making it impossible to miss. By the end of the day, the chain had incited a crazed and completely virtual easter egg, where some fans even retraced their steps to make sure they caught every single invitation.
Then this army of fans - old and new - was given the tools to sound their own personal rallying cry, through interactive horn lenses and custom emojis for communicating on popular WoW gaming platforms.
Results
The Horn of Gathering helped make WoW: Shadowlands the fastest selling PC game in history, moving over 3.7 million game copies on launch day alone. When the chain of epic invitations exploded onto social media, it garnered more than 8.5 million total views across influencer and organic channels. The Horn of Gathering lens was used more than 100,000 times across Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.
The campaign drove a spike of 57% increased engagement with the brand, while receiving less than 0.1% negative sentiment in a social listening study. This brought general negative conversation around World of Warcraft during the launch window down to 9%, as opposed to 35% in the weeks preceding.
Our Thoughts
This was a chain reaction in real-time.
Finn Wolfhard blew his horn in Twitter to summon Sydney Sweeney, who blew her horn for Ronda Rousey (picking up 352,722 ‘likes’ on the way) who got in touch across Instagram with Pierre Gasly, whose post picked up another 103,292 ‘likes’ and so it went. And that’s how you reach a generation that doesn’t watch advertising.
It’s easy for a brand manager to pay a bunch of influencers to pass a message on but this reached millions because it’s clever. It has an idea. It is evidence that agencies still have a role to play.