Fewer people are playing Madden than they once did, despite the fact that NFL ratings are higher than ever. To launch Madden NFL 15, EA Sports needed the popular franchise to regain its cultural relevance and connect with a new generation of football fans—an audience who shares in the love of the NFL’s rivalries. Those rivalries unfold massively online throughout the NFL season, especially in GIFs and memes, a favorite language of the internet.

Madden GIFERATOR launched for NFL’s kick-off weekend and by Monday was used to create over 200,000 GIFs. NFL teams, players, and fans quickly adopted GIFERATOR as a bullhorn for anything and everything football. GIFERATOR then catapulted into popular culture as it began trending on Tumblr, spawned its own subreddit, and exploded on Twitter.

The media piled on, covering GIFERATOR from every angle with more than 160 press articles and contributing to over 14MM earned impressions. Outlets as diverse as The Washington Post and Buzzfeed, Fox Sports and College Humor, Fast Company and Maxim jumped on the GIFERATOR and shared all the creative, crazy and unintuitive ways people found to use it.

We generated more than 2,300 GIFs in real-time across all 256 NFL games, helping keep Madden relevant all season long. Fans took over with over 417,000 GIFs of their own, sharing and resharing them to every corner of the internet. By the third day of the campaign, GIFERATOR was listed on “Know Your Meme”, and fans heralded our unique approach to game marketing. Tumblr listed the GIFERATOR as one of its most reblogged memes of the year, while Adweek called it one of the year’s most innovative digital ad products.

Engagement for EA was massive, hitting 3x the company’s benchmark for game marketing. Users spent an average of 8 minutes engaged with the GIFERATOR per session.

We created Madden GIFERATOR, a real-time NFL GIF engine that let fans celebrate winning moments and zing their rivals throughout the season. With each brag-worthy NFL play, GIFERATOR dynamically combined relevant Madden game footage, stinging headlines, and dynamic stats to instantly deliver share-worthy content at the height of the online conversation.

The real-time experience was powered by live NFL data and was built to find the biggest and most conversation-worthy plays. We fine-tuned our event triggers by running the GIFERATOR against game data from the entire 2014 NFL season. We found data-driven triggers for biggest scores, biggest turnovers, and most share-worthy plays.

To create a visual language that was uniquely Madden, we exported layered artwork from the video game’s developer edition, allowing us to scale our visual library to a huge pool of players across every NFL team—something that would have been infeasible to do by hand.

To create the most relevant, dynamic headlines, we built a logic system to match players and play types with an exhaustive library of copy. The headlines were updated in real-time as they were published to include dynamic statistics, essentially creating infinite possibilities for the GIFs, and keeping the content fresh throughout the entire season.

For every NFL game, GIFERATOR generated a live stream of animated GIFs triggered by the action unfolding on TV. Those GIFs were delivered in a second-screen experience, and also published in real-time ads distributed through Google’s global ad network, target ads to the fans already looking for game content. Each fan would see his team’s side of the story, fanning the flames of the rivalry as it unfolded. Our real-time publishing system was nearly instant—so quick, in fact, that our ads were frequently slightly ahead of the publisher’s websites on which they were served.

The entire experience was powered by live data. Within seconds of each play, the GIFERATOR quickly analyzed all elements of the play: the player, play type, yards, teams, scores, and other logical triggers. The GIFERATOR then picked from a huge library of game artwork, more than 11,000 headlines, and 260 background combinations to create the perfect GIF. Headlines could be customized with real-time stats and scores to take the sting to another level.

We also gave the keys to the GIFERATOR to the internet, allowing fans to create and modify their own GIFs to talk about football and everything else inbetween.