WELCOME HOME
Zillow For
Warcraft
We’ve created many unique immersive marketing campaigns over the years that champion fandom with authentic creative experiences. Zillow for Warcraft represents our latest immersive campaign, serving as a prime example of deeper brand engagement within a dedicated fandom.
Through this project, we invited the World of Warcraft community and a global audience to play, build, and explore Azeroth, with Zillow acting as the essential home-focused guide for the WoW’s Midnight expansion.
SETTING THE STAGE
Building an Immersive Moment
By their nature, these immersive campaigns are all unique for every client we work with. In Zillow’s case, they wanted to create an experience that gave the World of Warcraft community their own Zillow home listing site.
Our approach is always authentic to the communities we serve, reaching well beyond a typical marketing campaign. Our goal is always to inspire the community to become active participants in the campaigns we create — elevating Zillow from advertiser to community partner.
THE TEAM
Agents of
Chaos
We wanted to create authentic in-game agents that would drive our experience. We also wanted to establish some narrative guidelines that would give our agents some motivation. These characters really needed to speak to the community as authentic in-world characters in order to make this experience into something special. Hazyl and Bek’tar became our agents and a guiding light through the rest of the campaign.
We worked closely with Zillow and Blizzard to create the perfect agents for the campaign. These characters needed to exist in the game not only to create that authentic connection but to give us characters we could use to actually tour player created homes in realtime and maintain the immersion for everyone.
THE WORLD
Mapping
Azeroth
The interactive map is an iconic element of home shopping on Zillow so to bring it into World of Warcraft required careful considerations for both Zillow features and game components. As homes are added to the site, they appear in the neighborhood they were built in and the plot number for their specific location. This enables players to use the site not just as a fun experience to explore but as a useful tool for finding interesting homes and then getting a closer look at them in-game.
FIRST HOMES
List It
Like A Pro
Home listings on the site are another unique extension from the game world mixed with Zillow features and home-selling trends we’ve come to know and love over the years. Everything from photography style, home walk-through, and video flythroughs of the homes become fun opportunities to mix our world with World of Warcraft. Our character agents took on the task of writing the home descriptions and each home listing reflects a special narrative layer from their unique POV’s.
Over time, these listings welcomed real player homes with our first batch of new homes shared from content creators in the community. The site is set up to accommodate this and much more as it grows over time to feature homes in the game from all players in the game.
WORLD BUILDING
Ads for
Azeroth
What website wouldn’t be complete without some advertisement? We leaned into this meta game by taking real in-game characters, locations, lore, and creating ads for them in this setting. We’re not doing this just to fill space. These ads become an extension of the game lore and even set up another channel players were eager to unlock, FREE LOOT!
IN-GAME ITEMS
Free
Loot!
At launch, the site featured a limited edition in-game item for the community. Visitors to the site could collect this item by linking up their Blizzard game account and claiming it in-game. After a few weeks, we had yet another item to give away to fans but this time we wanted to make it a little less obvious so we hid it in a fake ad on the site. For those paying attention, they would spot this new ad and be treated to the limited edition loot for their new home.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Player
Homes
Key to the campaign is the inclusion and continued updates of new homes found in the game built by players. Shortly after the campaign launched and the World of Warcraft update was available to the public, we expanded the home listings with our first set of player-created homes. We partnered with key players for this and invited them to provide any details that make their homes special so our agents know what to talk about and keep an eye out for as they tour them.
THE ROLLOUT
Open
House
On the first few days of the campaign, over 2 million unique visitors explored the site. On week 1, we added new homes to the site. Week 2 saw the inclusion of new ads and even more homes. By week 3, our new home cadence had been established and a link to home contests between the community and Blizzard brought in even more traffic as those homes became featured on the site.
With each and every update, we expanded the immersive experience with more narrative around our agents and the homes they visited. Each added home presents an opportunity to catch the agents in the wilds of Azeroth. As the campaign rolls on, the homes listed become a reflection of the amazing community in the World of Warcraft.
1 WEEK
1M
VISITS
LISTED
14
HOMES
3 WEEKS
6M
VISITS