Despite World of Warcaft’s legendary status within the gaming community, it encountered a surprising challenge: after 16 years of rallying people to its online platform, more and more potential new players felt they had missed the boat to join in the adventure. So Blizzard set out to launch its new expansion, WoW: Shadowlands, and entice a new breed of fans to the franchise.

In a break from traditional long form, cinematic storytelling, Blizzard identified social media as the leading vessel to employ a fresh creative approach and reach a diverse breadth of gamers who may have long since written off World of Warcraft. The objective was to increase top of mind awareness and consideration of WoW: Shadowlands, and by doing so, dispelling the notion that there’s ever a point where it’s too late to jump into Warcraft.

To solve the modern engagement challenge facing World of Warcraft, Blizzard employed a cutting edge piece of modern technology….a horn. The Horn of Gathering to be exact. Blizzard created a giant, medieval horn with the purpose of uniting unique and unexpected figures from all corners of the world to sound the horn and call fellow new players into WoW: Shadowlands. But it wasn’t a standard call to arms - it was an epic invitation.

Leaning on the classic trope of calling your allies into battle, the Horn of Gathering became the modern day equivalent of a rallying cry, and the engrained CTA to #soundthehorn ensured shareability was second nature. And by having these rallying cries take place across all reaches of social media, hardcore fans and casual players alike could feel the excitement to charge into Shadowlands as it built in real time.

To capitalize on nerd and gaming culture breaking into the mainstream, Blizzard knew that traditional paid media would only get them so far. Speaking to their standard audience with an expected, expansion-focused message would likely fall on deaf ears. To broaden our appeal and target the new generation of nerds, the message had to come from somewhere else, and the invitation had to be way more legendary.

Blizzard concluded that Shadowlands couldn’t penetrate broader audience awareness on the back of a few celebrity-endorsed social posts. However, by tapping into the multifaceted interests of pop-nerd culture, Blizzard identified 14 celebrities across sport, TV/film, music, and online streaming that would create breakthrough. These celebrities directly linked their posts in the form of a clickable, tag-and-pass-along chain on social media, to form a completely organic following in the exact cross section of audience interest that Blizzard was seeking.

Within one hour on November 30th, Blizzard unleashed the Horn of Gathering through 14 global partners on Instagram. They simultaneously tagged one another in 1min in-feed posts, each inviting the next to #soundthehorn and jump into World of Warcraft together. By day’s end, the chain had incited a crazed virtual easter egg hunt. Fans retraced their steps to make sure they caught every invitation, jumping from athletes in France, to actors in China, to streamers in the United States.

Blizzard then released a series of social tools to ensure fans could carry on sounding the horn, from interactive filters on Snapchat and Facebook, to custom emojis and expressions on the popular gaming communication platform, Discord. Finally, Blizzard rewarded passionate celebrity fans with a special delivery: an original replica of the Horn of Gathering in a medieval chest. Surprise and delight reactions ensued for their followers to see on social media.

When the chain of epic invitations exploded onto Instagram, it garnered more than 8.5M total views across influencer and organically-owned channels, ultimately landing the hand-picked audience at-scale effect they were seeking with the original influencer strategy. Alongside increased awareness, the campaign drove a spike of 57% increased engagement with the brand, while receiving less than .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.

Beyond the social film views and engagement, the Horn of Gathering lens was used more than 100K times across Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.

Finally, on the conversion side of the funnel, WoW: Shadowlands delivered on the hype. It became the fastest selling PC game in history, selling over 3.7 million units by the end of its launch day.