Minecraft is a massive global phenomenon, and its lack of instruction is huge reason why. Players have taught each other the game, which has helped catapult Minecraft to become one of the largest gaming communities of all time. In fact, if Minecraft were a nation, it’d be the 12th largest in the world. This community has created a wealth of shared knowledge, and not just in the form of Wikis and long form tutorial videos. They have also created their own vernacular. Short, entertaining, insider pieces of wisdom that only those in the know fully understand. #MinecraftIRL taps into this vernacular and brings these wisdoms to the real world through a series of social content. Each post is designed to bring one piece of Minecraft insider-knowledge to life, while also acting as an invitation for players to share their own hard-earned lessons with the community.

The social-first #MinecraftIRL campaign leveraged the brand’s owned channels to release multiple social videos and stills per week. We celebrated the loyal Minecraft community by taking inspiration from their communal wisdom. Then we leveraged this knowledge and brought it to life in a fun and unexpected way – by merging their favorite game with the real world.

We crafted instantly recognizable objects and characters from the game and set them in real-world versions of the game scenes (Llama farms, anyone?). Then we created our series of social posts by combining stills and short videos of these scenes with fundamental game lessons. These posts included a call-to-action that invited the Minecraft community to participate and create their own lessons In Real Life. The #MinecraftIRL campaign kicked off on Thanksgiving and ran through New Year’s, keeping Minecraft top of mind during the brand’s most opportune time frame to increase average play time.

The campaign content was celebrated and successfully inspired the community to engage, talk, share, and ultimately play more Minecraft during the year’s peak play time. High social metrics reaffirmed the community’s love and advocacy for Minecraft. Most notably, the content on Facebook and Twitter was shared over 36,000 times and social videos were viewed over 5.8 million times. The highly engaging campaign saw over 4,000 mentions of the campaign hashtag #MinecraftIRL during this time frame. On Twitter alone, the hashtag has received 42,743,974 impressions to date. The overall campaign garnered over 32.8 million total reach and had a residual effect of attracting 71.5K new fans and followers on our owned Facebook and Twitter channels respectively.