THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 16th Annual Shorty Awards

Elevating Owned Social

Finalist in Gaming

Objectives

Riot Games approached Ayzenberg with a challenge: how can we help engage League of Legends’ very specific player community in an authentic way, all while keeping them consistently entertained, every day, month over month?

We became the first agency to partner closely with Riot on providing evergreen content for their owned channels at scale, creating daily content for X, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Rising to this challenge meant building a dedicated team to live and breathe League social every day. In collaboration with Riot, we built a strategy of entertaining evergreen posts, ongoing content series, educational content leveraging gameplay capture, quick turn trending and reactive workflows, as well as social-first approaches to each new campaign.

Strategy and Execution

We’re now one year in, and we couldn’t be more proud of the work. What you see here is a small selection of some of our favorite posts from 2023, ranging from X activations that saw Braum’s mustache grow with more likes, IG carousels that memed a trending new feature for Neeko, and the soothing movements of Scuttlecrab walking over monuments on TikTok.

To deep-dive on just one example, let’s look at what makes a post like our Briar “muted words” creative so special. Briar was a new League of Legends champion released this year, and our team created an entire campaign of bespoke social creative to support her release - from cooking videos, to hangry gifs, to Tumblr memes, to ability spotlights, and more. All of these posts were performing well, yet when the Briar key art dropped, all conversation on social went to just one place - the way her feet were so prominent in the key art. This could have been a campaign ending moment on social, yet instead we aligned with client on a strategy to lean into the skid and do something that only social can do. Our response was a real time, platform-specific post that could only be done on X, and could only come from @LeagueofLegends. Using Twitter’s native mute tools, we announced to the world, “If your tweet contains these four words, League of Legends isn’t gonna see it.” By capturing the zeitgeist of the moment, and by speaking a language only social can speak, this post garnered over 30K likes and became the most-engaged champion X post of the year, generating endless memes, riffs, and fan art, resulting in over 175% more mentions for Briar than any prior champion that year and over 4.6M earned engagements.

And that was just one day out of going live every single day this year.

Results

The results of this hard work speak for themselves, as 2023 has seen overall growth in positive player sentiment quarter over quarter as well as more than 40M video views and 125M impressions across all our content. Additionally, driven by an increase in post volume of over 500% year-over-year, the League of Legends TikTok account has grown by more than 6x in 2023.

Media

Video for Elevating Owned Social

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Ayzenberg, Riot Games

Links

Entry Credits