THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Industry

See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Auto See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Beauty See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Business to Business See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Consumer Brand See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Education See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Entertainment See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Financial Services See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Fitness, Health, & Wellness
<br>See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Food & Beverage
See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Gaming See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Government & Politics See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Hospitality See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Insurance See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Live Events See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> News & Media See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Non-Profit See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Pets & Animals See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Pharma & Healthcare See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Real Estate See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Restaurants See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Retail & E-Commerce See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Social Activism See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Sports See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Technology See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Television See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Travel & Tourism See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Wine, Beer & Spirits

Strategy & Engagement

See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Brand Partnership See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Call to Action See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Community Management See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Creative Use of Technology See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> CTV/OTT See previous winners and honorees for Insights and Trends here.</a> <a href=https://shortyawards.com/9th-impact/"https://shortyawards.com/category/16th/data-visualization">See previous winners and honorees for Data Visualization here.</a>"> Data & Insights See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Earned Media See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Event & Experiential See previous winners and honorees here.</a>""> Gamification See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Humor See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Innovative Media Buying Strategy See previous winners and honorees here.</a>""> Integration with Traditional Media See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Internal Communications See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> LGBTQ Community Engagement See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Micro-Influencer Strategy See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Multicultural Community Engagement See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Music & Dance See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> On a Shoestring See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Organic Promotion See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Paid & Amplification See previous winner and honorees here.</a>"> Physical and Digital Convergence See previous winner and honorees here.</a>"> Public Service Announcement See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Real Time Response See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> SEO & SEM See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Social Commerce See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Storytelling
From the 9th Annual Shorty Impact Awards

Duriel’s Offering

Finalist in Integrated Campaign, Call to Action

Gold Honor in X (formerly Twitter), Community Engagement, Images

Silver Honor in Fundraising Campaign, Animal Rights & Welfare, Entertainment

Audience Honor in X (formerly Twitter), Entertainment, Images

Entered in Nonprofit Partnership

Objectives

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.

Strategy and Execution

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.

Results

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.

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Diablo IV

Links

Entry Credits