“Make Love Not WarCraft” & Celebrity Marketing

In 2006, Blizzard Entertainment, the game development company responsible for titles like Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo, helped create an episode in South Park’s 10^th season called “Make Love Not WarCraft”. Unlike most South Park episodes this episode used in game animations from Blizzard’s mass multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) “World of WarCraft”. Nearly half of this episode was actually shot within one of Blizzards active serves, all while other players were still playing the game. During the episode the South Park kids were set out to level up their characters to challenge a player that was such a high level that “he could be the end of the World…of WarCraft”.

 

The episode is quite hilarious and is a very good example of a cobranded product that was made for the benefit of both South Park and Blizzard Entertainment. Shortly after its airing in 2007, the episode won the “Prime Time Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program”, which became the shows second Emmy Award at that time. What the creators of South Park, University of Colorado graduates Trey Parker and Matt Stone, found surprising was that Blizzard was on board to help make the episode. This is because much of the episode hints at the fact that the better and more powerful one’s character is in the World of WarCraft the more likely they are to having “no life”. Over the course of the episode as the South Park kids characters become higher levels the fatter and more grotesque they appear. This sight does not really shed a good light on WoW players, but in the sense that any press is good press it achieved its goal of increased exposer for Blizzard’s game and shortly after WoW became the highest grossing game in the history of games with over 10 million subscribed users.

South Park has a history of being highly offensive and much of that has attributed to its success over the years, but when other companies are given the chance to cobrand a product with a company like South Park most would pass it up, as not to offend their already loyal fan base. So what Blizzard did here was a major gamble and as we have seen over the years it paid off with dividends. When South Park finally released its season 10 on DVD the cover had images from the “Make Love Not Warcraft Episode”, as well as, a trial game disc for consumers who had yet to experience the World of Warcraft.

Since then WoW has dropped in popularity, but still currently maintains over 10 million subscribers. With a fee of around $15 dollars a month per user this means that Blizzard brings in around $150 million in revenue every month just from subscriptions alone. To maintain these numbers Blizzard has implemented a marketing campaign using a wide range of celebrities to reach out to the many generations of its users, including celebrities like Jean Claude Van Damme, Ozzy Osbourne, Mr. T, Chuck Norris and most recently Aubrey Plaza. With each of these celebrities reaching the height of their popularity in a different decade Blizzard has been able to diversify its exposer to its target consumers.

My favorite among these commercials is the one with Chuck Norris because it focuses its message with the recent Chuck Norris facts that have immortalized him to a younger generation that might not have realized his first screen appearance was fighting legendary kung fu master Bruce Lee in 1972. Clever commercials like this one have helped maintain WoW’s popularity over the years and kept the money rolling in for what is the most profitable game in the history of video games.