Overwatch is a first-person hero shooter video game, that has a wild, enthusiastic and dedicated fanbase. Below is a collection of organic and paid social campaigns I led my team of 6+ creatives to concept, develop and execute across social platforms while managing client approvals, production and partnering with strategy and account to bring it to life.
SPOTLIGHT 2026
This is Blizzard’s version of the Super Bowl. No joke, with over a 1.25B reach. They reveal their plans for the upcoming year, including new heroes, maps, updates and more. They fly in streamers and collaborators for this 2 day in-person event. 2026’s Spotlight was the biggest in history, not only with the amount of content they pushed out, but with the amount of players who returned to the game.
For social we knew we had to go big. In this chronically online world, we pushed out over 30 posts over the course of the 2 days, giving fans GIFs, memes, and all the content they needed to not just follow along with Spotlight, but feel as if they were part of Spotlight and in the action.
With my team, we exceeded benchmarks from 2025’s’ Spotlight, with a 69% increase in brand mentions and a 221% increase in earned engagements. Owned channels had over double the impressions at 34.6M. X and Instagram were the primary drivers of the attention, which led Overwatch to trend across many platforms—#1 in YouTube Gaming, #2 Globally on X (with JPC at #9 and Emre at #11), and #3 on Twitch.
The WORK
To start Spotlight, we wanted to give fans a tease of what was to come. So 2 weeks prior we instituted a takeover by the “villain” faction within the game. The Talon Takeover. We started with a full sweep update (profile pics/banners/etc) and a teaser video across platforms to signal something was changing. We followed up with a flock to unlock post promising goodies behind likes/comments.
Comments, likes and engagement far exceeded expectations and we followed up with wallpapers, GIFS, and a limited number of codes for our players as thanks for engaging. When all was said and done, we had #TALON trending at #5 on X globally, and had over 214M impressions and 1.7M engagements.
We showed that sometimes a simple and mysterious takeover can do the numbers and work as a perfect teaser leading into Spotlight.
Where are your heroes now?
For the day of Spotlight we did a blitz of posts, including using popular meme formats to follow along the livestream when our audience was glued to their phones scrolling. This included poking fun at the content (and our players), as well as tagging in popular streamers and unique IYKYK content for them. We also posted 5 unique social first videos for each of the new heroes, which were then updated to become paid boosted posts after seeing their initial success as organic.
In preparation for Spotlight, a few of us flew out to Seattle to capture the Developers in some social first content to create a series we could push out at the end of Spotlight. We know our core loves Dev insight, and we thought to package it in a social-friendly way that would appeal to our core and all the newcomers who were just being introduced.
To further increase engagement and really spotlight (get it?) our new heroes, we also commissioned a few artists to do poster sized prints of our new heroes. This led to an influx of fanart and UGC and our community loved seeing the collabs with some of their fav artists.
