Darkness is at the heart of the Diablo video games, but there are sparks of hope even there. Our social media channels are uniquely positioned to ignite those sparks into flames, bright enough to pierce the darkness and make positive changes in the real world.
Such is the story of Duriel’s Offering; a most unusual social media campaign where we successfully leveraged our platforms for charity while simultaneously enhancing our gruesome persona and growing our audience.
It began with two goals:
1) Celebrate Earth Day in a way that wouldn’t feel disingenuous given our snarky, subversive social tone
2) Thoughtfully allocate our resources to benefit the Earth in significant, tangible ways.
Once those goals were agreed upon, the challenge then became finding the right partner for this unconventional journey.
So the search began. And that search took us far and wide, all the way across the proverbial pond.
We eventually found the partner we were looking for in Tiggywinkles, The Wildlife Hospital Foundation; a specialist hospital in Britain dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating all species of local wildlife. They are a remarkably effective organization…and one that happens to accept donations of maggots to feed their voracious patients.
A match made in Heaven. Or rather, in Hell.
It was immediately clear that Duriel needed to be the centerpiece of the campaign. This particularly nasty demon prince is known in the Diablo universe as the Maggot King, after all. Another perfect fit. Because even the most grotesque demons have a soft spot, Duriel generously offered to sacrifice his own brood to Tiggywinkles’ noble cause for Earth Day.
Hence, the activation’s title: Duriel’s Offering.
The next step was developing a Twitter/X posting blueprint to maximize audience engagement. After working with Tiggywinkles to confirm maggot metrics (a new term we created for this activation) we crafted a strategy: for every 25 likes we would donate one bucket of maggots, with the goal of 666 buckets, or 30 million maggots total.
We maintained enthusiastic engagement with multiple posts that combined on-theme copy along with creatively altered images of Duriel and charming pictures of the creatures we’d be feeding to get our followers as excited as we were.
And it worked.
Duriel’s Offering was an ambitious activation that required extensive cross-team collaboration within Blizzard along with international cooperation with the Tiggywinkles team. There were many moving parts (not to mention much writhing larva) but the results were well worth it.
The campaign was an unequivocal success by every metric. Duriel's Offering had massive results on Twitter/X, far exceeding our average engagement rates. We cleared our goal much faster than anticipated, landing 16K likes on our original CTA within 8 hours.
The success of Duriel’s Offering proves that cross-vertical, cross-industry, cross-border, and even cross-species collaboration can have truly remarkable results for everyone when properly executed.
