The Diablo franchise first came to prominence nearly 30 years ago because it wasn’t afraid to play with its dark undertones. But the things that made the franchise so edgy at first – violence, gore, darkness – have become normalized and desensitized since then. We had to find a new source of edge and taboo to build the cultural awareness we needed.

And the launch window is make or break for a game. Get people buzzing about it early and you create momentum. Don’t, and you get a dud.

Before our work launched, title awareness was sitting at a paltry 4.3%. Blizzard has seen strong correlation between unaided awareness and sales, so boosting this number would be critical to success.

In order to meet their financial goals, they were projecting we would need to reach at least 12% unaided awareness across the campaign, and preferably as high as 15%

Celebrate hell by corrupting the most Heavenly place possible, a church, with our central deity Halsey to create the ultimate sanctuary for evil, worthy of the demons in our game.

Knowing our audience’s affinity for music videos on YouTube, we created a sinister anthem and video with two of our audience’s favorite artists, Halsey (3.2x affinity) and SUGA from BTS (2.9x affinity). The church was decked out in hand-painted art from the game, showing off the game’s return to its no-holds-barred dark roots. Throughout the video, Halsey corrupts the church, and turns into the game’s antagonist, Lilith (which was also the title of the song).

Take a decade-old name in gaming and create breakthrough relevance with modern gamers by tapping into the excitement and thrills that come from breaking taboos.

We’d lean into the fact that they’re at the bleeding edge of a dark culture renaissance.

They were captivated by the forbiddenness of Lil Nas X’s “Satan Shoe” (containing real human blood) (4.2x affinity) and Kim Kardashian’s gothic-inspired Balenciaga collection (3.6x affinity). They’re fans of gothic artists like Bosch (2.7x affinity) and Caravaggio (3.2x affinity).

Our strategy was to infiltrate and subvert the parts of culture they’re already consuming, as this audience avoids all types of advertising (128 index), and doesn’t trust traditional advertising (84%). We’d bring the darkness of Diablo into the places where they were already consuming content, to prove that nowhere was safe from our corrupting reach.

Lilith was a well known Halsey hit, so we had to give it new life while connecting it back to Diablo IV, without letting it feel like a sponsored brand song.

We pulled instrumentation inspiration and melodies from the game world and shared them with Halsey and her studio producer to inspire new rhythms and instrumentation for the song. Then we curated a number of visceral game moments and shared them to inspire new lyrics in select parts of the song to further connect the title to our game’s villainous Daughter of Hatred.

To further blend the game and the spectacle of music videos, we painted the ceiling of a deconsecrated 16th century church in France with game art that could serve as a backdrop to her performance. The art created the conflict and struggle that injured Halsey and set the path for her corrupted transformation into Lilith.

Unaided awareness jumped over 300%, from 4.3% to 18.7%.

23 million organic views on the music video. The song hit #1 on iTunes (in 63 countries), #4 on Spotify, and trended #1 on YouTube.

Over 10 million copies sold, generating over $666 million in just 5 days, 14.5 million within 18 days, topping $1 billion.

Diablo is by far now Blizzard’s fastest selling and biggest game launch of all time.

600K+ tweets upon release. 90 articles garnering 2B+ impressions.

Audience passion scores for Diablo IV increased by 50%, from 54 to 81.