Darkness lies at the core of the Diablo video games, yet even in that shadow, sparks of hope can be found. Our social media channels are uniquely positioned to ignite those sparks into flames - bright enough to pierce the darkness and inspire meaningful change in the real world.
This 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 macabre persona and growing our audience.
It all began with two primary goals:
Once these goals were established, the next challenge was to find the right partner for this unorthodox endeavor.
And so, the search began. And that search took us far and wide, all the way across the proverbial pond.
We eventually found the perfect partner in Tiggywinkles, The Wildlife Hospital Foundation - a specialist hospital in Britain dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating all species of local wildlife. They’re 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 must be the centerpiece of the campaign. This particularly nasty demon prince is known as the Maggot King in the Diablo universe, after all. Another perfect fit. And 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.
Thus, the campaign’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 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 in 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. This combination of dark humor and measurable positive impact got our audience as excited about the unique cause as we were.
And it worked.
Duriel’s Offering was an ambitious activation that required extensive cross-team collaboration across Blizzard and international cooperation with the Tiggywinkles team. Despite the many moving parts (and plenty of writhing larvae), the results were well worth the effort.
The campaign was an unequivocal success by every metric. Duriel's Offering delivered exceptional results on Twitter/X, far exceeding our average engagement rates. We surpassed our goal much faster than anticipated, with our original call-to-action post receiving 16K likes within just 8 hours.
Most importantly, the campaign achieved its ultimate goal: fewer hungry birds in the world.
The success of Duriel’s Offering proves that cross-vertical, cross-industry, cross-border, and even cross-species collaboration can yield truly remarkable results for everyone when properly executed.
