World of Warcraft (WoW) has been at the forefront of online gaming for 20 years. We have released nine expansions over two decades, each bringing fresh gaming content to a massive, global audience of millions of players.
That trend continued in 2023 with the highly-anticipated and well-received release of our latest expansion, Dragonflight. To further leverage that post-release excitement and generate additional enthusiasm for a large content patch as part of that expansion, we set out to grab audience attention in a way only WoW can; by leveraging our immense collection of art and narrative developed over the course of two decades.
The question we had to answer was a simple one: How can we get our audience excited about an upcoming release roadmap? This educational asset ran the risk of flying under the proverbial radar unless supported by a creative, social-first activation that could get our audience talking.
The answer? Longdog.
The results? Our most successful organic campaign ever and one that’s still being discussed by our community almost a year later.
In early previews of our new content patch, Embers of Neltharion, one peculiar creature grabbed the attention of our community. Dubbed Longdog by our players, this long-legged fellow stood out as an ideal candidate for generating audience excitement about the roadmap asset.
Our first step was identifying the ideal social channel for the campaign. Twitter/X has been an invaluable messaging tool for us over the last decade, and the platform’s unique ability to utilize threaded images provides opportunities for creative execution other platforms lack. We knew the image of Longdog would be pivotal for messaging. Thus, the concept of pairing those unusually long legs with the threaded image feature leapt to life.
Our designers began crafting a series of images, each more absurd than the last. The next step was developing a call to action explicitly designed to generate conversation and encourage return audience engagement throughout the campaign.
To ensure sufficient distribution, we leveraged other Blizzard brands and audiences via cross-IP brand collaboration to engage with the campaign. As soon as the activation went live, interaction and audience reach immediately exceeded expectations. Our reactive copywriters kept the conversation going live throughout the day, replying to comments and encouraging our community to share in the extraordinary power of the very long dog.
Conversation throughout the WoW community, across our social channels and beyond, was impressive.
Engagement hit record volumes, with some even contributing their own creative interpretations of Longdog.
Longdog was a success by every metric, handily achieving our goal of driving audiences to engage with the roadmap campaign. When the roadmap was eventually made public on our social channels, we saw a 460% increase in comments, a 188% increase in engagement over median posts, and a 40% boost in total engagements compared to the last roadmap posted. The initial post had 2x impressions, 10x likes, and 9x total engagements over median performance.
The entire execution for the day had 22x total engagements over our median metrics.
So here’s to Longdog, the mascot every educational asset needs.
