Automating Digital Production at Blizzard with Internal Tools

To improve speed, accuracy, and scalability in Blizzard’s digital workflows, I led the development of two internal tools used across Blizzard and Activision: an ECRM email builder and a modular website creation platform. These tools empowered non-technical teams to produce campaigns and web pages at scale—reducing manual coding, streamlining localization, and cutting production time by half.

Context

Blizzard’s web and marketing teams launched hundreds of emails and landing pages annually. But production was manual and fragmented:

  • Designers were hand-coding emails from scratch
  • Site creation required front-end dev support, creating bottlenecks
  • Localization was slow and error-prone
  • Teams worked in silos, with no shared production framework

This created unnecessary complexity in an environment where speed, quality, and customization were essential.

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Solution 1: Internal ECRM Tool for Email Campaigns

The Problem

Manual email creation slowed delivery, introduced human error, and made localization expensive and inconsistent. Teams needed a non-technical tool to automate routine work..

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What We Built
  • Drag-and-drop interface for building campaigns with modular components
  • One-click localization for up to 20 languages
  • Automatic HTML export for seamless deployment
  • Visual QA within the editor

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Impact
  • Cut production time in half
  • Eliminated coding errors in hundreds of campaigns
  • Enabled large-scale personalization, including a WoW re-engagement campaign where players received animated GIFs of their own characters speaking to them

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Solution 2: Modular Website Builder

The Problem

Web teams needed to create full websites quickly—but were dependent on engineering for even basic builds. With 10+ teams across franchises, a flexible, scalable platform was needed.

What We Built

We developed a flexible, API-driven website builder with:

  • Component-based builder with reusable page modules
  • Custom states, interactions, and dialogues for UX/UI flexibility
  • Built-in version control and user management
  • Seamless localization for 7+ languages
  • API integrations (e.g. Contentstack) for dynamic content workflows

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Impact
  • Enabled teams to build and update sites without front-end coding
  • Accelerated time-to-market for campaigns
  • Reduced developer dependency, allowing engineers to focus on core systems
  • Improved localization efficiency and consistency

Why It Mattered

These tools transformed Blizzard’s internal production model—reducing manual work, eliminating inefficiencies, and enabling faster, more personalized digital experiences.

They became standard tools across Blizzard and Activision, setting a new internal benchmark for design enablement, localization scalability, and production automation.

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