People don’t like goblins.
At least that is what our Marketing team told us when it came time to create the strategy for promoting the Undermine(d) patch for World of Warcraft. The problem was, the entire patch was centered on goblins.
What did I see? Crafty engineers with an penchant for explosives and a mob-like society that was always out to get their share. Absolutely brimming personality and potential. And we were about to give them a whole bunch of it.
We took every piece of content in this patch as an opportunity to show off how entertaining goblins actually are. Instead of zone flythroughs, let’s do a tourism ad. Need to show off a new driving feature? Make it a sleazy car commercial! Who could possibly not like goblins after this?
We injected humor and goblin flair in feature previews…
…crafted a news channel and shows…
..…a sports network…
…and even an Undermine Marketplace.
One more ride.
For the breakout component of the campaign the original content team partnered with Oomi and the YouTube channel BigTime to bring one of the primary features of the Undermine(d) content to life: we created an IRL Goblin Hot Rod.
With a hero film on our YT channel, a longer BTS video created for BigTime’s channel, and cutdowns deployed across all o&o channels during launch week, we pulled off the impossible on an insane deadline and unlocked an audience we previously had never tapped.
RESULTS
A content patch that was feared to be unpopular with the player base turned out to be one of the of the most well-received content updates of The War Within expansion.
The Goblin Hot Rod execution resulted in 730k views, including 650k from an untapped, high affinity audience, a 70% video retention rate, and over 200k hours watched.
Sentiment on posts was very positive with particularly good performance on Facebook and YouTube Shorts.
A few top posts:
The Spongebob Cockroach Burger had 2.5x impressions and 5x engagement rate compared to averages on Facebook.
The Goblin News & Kaja’cola Caper videos each had 3.4x the average engagement rate on YouTube shorts.
Social Team Credits
Creative Direction: Justin Marcus
Designers: HB Straw, Eric Matos, Lorraine Pham, Brian H Kim
Copywriters: Heath Milo, Daniel White
Producers: Martin McDonagh
Marketing Partners: Britain Taylor, Jess Downey
Original Content Team Credits
Creative Direction: Justin Marcus
Director, Original Content: Mike Norys
Producers: DJ Spahr, Jonathan Roman, Zach Cieszynski, Jeremy Lyons
Editing & Capture: Mia Malchow, Andrew Mikida, Daniel Tong
Marketing Partners: Britain Taylor, Jess Downey