As season two of the League of Legends Netflix series Arcane ascended back into the zeitgeist, Riot Games partnered with Ayzenberg to help solve a challenge: how can we meaningfully support fandom in a way that elevates our content, but still leaves space for the community to express themselves?
Riot and Ayzenberg’s secret sauce has always been our unique approach that blurs the line between fans and brand—just ask the meme accounts that repost our content or the TikTok creators that make fan cams dedicated to our community management. As Arcane’s imminent release swelled with rapturous anticipation, we knew this community-first approach would be instrumental in achieving our goals.
We set out on our strategy, crafting content that came from a place of genuine fandom for the game, all the while embedding ourselves in the community in search of any opportunity to action on niche trends and turn them into ownable moments for the brand. This strategy made us uniquely prepared to capitalize on an unforeseeable sea change.
A bomb-shell moment mid-season threw the community into discord, causing many fans to change their social profile pics to align with or against a popular character, Jayce. We immediately recognized this trend as an opportunity to not just participate alongside the community, but catapult it to another level in an unexpected way fans would never see coming from the official account.
So, we updated our profile pic to a chaotic, Frankenstein-ed image that left fans bewildered.
This unexpected and unannounced change caused a TikTok and X-wide chain reaction that flooded feeds with brand recognition of the Official League of Legends presence, but it didn’t stop there. The ball kept rolling as we saw an explosion of unhinged profile pics, copy cats, and a movement that spilled beyond social into both internet history and the red carpet event for Arcane’s series finale.
Our social-listening and hyper-reactive response enabled us to explode a burgeoning trend into a certified watershed moment for the brand in a way that lived separately from Arcane.
Ultimately, this resulted in:
- League’s largest 7 day increase in TikTok followers on record, 93,494.
- A red carpet video featuring Arcane stars reacting to the profile pics becoming our third most-engaged TikTok post of all time (1.2 million likes).
- A tribute to the moment becoming the top UGC-driven post in League of Legend’s history with 564k likes.
