After 25 years & being deemed King of the (American) football kingdom – Madden’s reign faltered. In a year’s time, the storied video game franchise experienced a 650,000 unit drop in sales.

Even more troubling, the Madden buyer was getting older, with an average age of 26 (four years older than other top-selling games). Younger gamers were shifting their attention to games that engrained themselves in pop culture—first-person shooters (Call of Duty) and action-adventure games (Grand Theft Auto V).

In order to hit our sales numbers for the year and combat a devastating decline, we needed to make Madden feel popular again. To do this we tapped into the behaviors and interests of our audience—music, viral video, Internet memes, and star athletes.

Our challenge was to reinvigorate the Madden franchise by positioning Madden 15 as the must-have title among the youth target and build its appeal as the ultimate expression of modern competition and rivalry. Our specifics goals were to: (1) Increase year-over-year sales; (2) Introduce Madden 15 to a younger generation of gamers; (3) Make Madden 15 one of the top 10 selling games of the year.

To accomplish this we developed the strategy “Rivalry Elevates Everything,” which celebrated rivalry and competition–among our players, their friends, and the professional teams and players they love. We took the strategy beyond football and created a campaign that tapped into the aspects of life that interest our target the most: pop culture, celebrities, humor and Internet culture. With that, the Madden Season campaign was born.

We employed a digital-first roll out for our Madden Season campaign, using digital channels and celebrity influencers to launch a 3:30 piece of branded content. The video garnered over 17MM views before a single spot aired on TV. Kevin Hart kicked off the broadcast portion of the campaign by introducing the long-form video during a live telecast of SportsCenter following the season’s first Monday Night Football game. We created rivalry videos between NFL athletes and Vine stars to ensure Madden made it into Internet pop culture. To date, the long-form video has accumulated over 40MM views. Lastly, we developed the Madden GIFERATOR, a season-long piece designed to engage fans with Madden content each week. During every NFL game, the Madden GIFERATOR fused live NFL data with Madden 15 game footage to generate a live stream of GIFS that were targeted to fans of specific teams. Fans could also use footage to create their own rivalry-themed GIFs to send to friends.

It’s Madden Season – knowing our audience embraces advertising content if it’s entertaining & transparent about what it’s selling, we created a 3:30-minute Madden NFL 15 music video, starring Kevin Hart, Dave Franco, NFL athletes, and a dolphin. Kicked off via bite-sized pieces of content shared on our targets’ social feeds – via their idols. Dez Bryant’s 1 million Facebook fans saw him snipping Colin Kaepernick’s headphone cord. NBA star Damian Lillard wrote a Madden-infused hip-hop song that inspired copycats. And Kevin Hart gave us love on Instagram. By the time our long-form music video launched, our fans were ready.

Within the first few weeks, the Madden Season campaign greatly exceeded all expectations and EA’s wildest dreams:

- Our music video garnered over 21 million views—all before a single spot aired on TV (37MM views to-date after airing on TV)

- Ad recall, among 13–17-year-old guys, was 17 points over EA’s norm.

- Purchase intent scored 16 points over EA SPORTS testing norms.

- Sales went up 14% while category sales declined 13%

- Madden NFL 15 was the #2 selling console game of 2014

We wanted to launch Madden Season with a fresh approach to content marketing that would be good enough to run as editorial. However, media owners will only accept content without being paid if their audience will appreciate it: otherwise it’s labeled as paid advertising. So we wrote an original piece of music and it became the centerpiece of our entire Madden 15 launch campaign in the form of a 3-minute Madden-centric music video.