Building Internal Tools to Automate Blizzard’s Digital Production
Objective: Streamlining Digital Content Creation
Blizzard’s marketing and web teams required faster, more scalable ways to build and deploy digital assets. Traditional methods involved manual coding for emails and websites, making production slow and error-prone. To address this, I led the development of two internal tools that transformed how Blizzard’s teams created and managed digital content:
- An ECRM tool to automate email marketing campaigns.
- A website builder to enable fast, modular site creation.
Both tools eliminated redundant manual work, improved collaboration, and doubled efficiency across teams.
Tool 1: Automating Email Campaigns with an Internal ECRM System
The Challenge
Blizzard and Activision teams sent hundreds of email campaigns per year, with designers manually coding each email. This process was inefficient, prone to errors, and time-consuming. We needed an automated, scalable solution.
The Solution
I led the development of an in-house email builder, allowing teams to:
- Drag and drop email components (images, text, buttons) instead of coding.
- One-click localization for up to 20 languages.
- Instantly export HTML for campaign deployment.
Impact
The tool cut production time in half, eliminating human errors and allowing teams to produce campaigns at scale. A major success story was a World of Warcraft re-engagement campaign, where players received emails featuring personalized animated GIFs of their in-game character speaking directly to them—a level of customization that was previously impossible.
Tool 2: Empowering Teams with a Modular Website Builder
The Challenge
Following the success of the landing page creator, Blizzard needed a full-scale website builder that allowed teams to quickly create and manage sites without front-end coding. The challenge was gathering requirements from 10+ teams and balancing diverse needs into a single tool.
The Solution
We developed a flexible, API-driven website builder with:
- A modular system for building pages with reusable components.
- Custom states, symbols, and dialogs for interactive UI elements.
- User management & version control for collaboration and tracking.
- Seamless localization support across 7+ languages.
- API integrations (e.g., Contentstack) to streamline workflows.
Impact
The website builder dramatically increased efficiency, allowing designers, developers, and editors to build and modify sites without coding knowledge. It reduced dependency on engineering teams, sped up deployment, and enabled greater customization.
Conclusion
By developing these two internal tools, Blizzard streamlined the production of emails and websites, eliminating bottlenecks, reducing errors, and empowering teams to work faster and more independently. These tools became a standard across Blizzard and Activision, setting a new benchmark for internal efficiency.
