The Internet is a place where our audience’s interests, passions, mashups, and inside jokes collide, so we made the ultimate pieces of content combining the things they love most: movies, dinosaurs, catch phrases, celebrities, and Robot Chicken-style puppets.

Our digitally native idea focused on taking the piss out of pop culture and celebrating Madden 16 with a ludicrously over-the-top movie and spin-off series that teens (and sports fans) couldn’t un-see or look away from.

To truly break through, we had to accept that we were not just competing with other video games, but with pop culture as a whole. This meant outshining Kanye+Kim, dishing out drama that would rival the NBA (our audience’s favorite sport), AND triggering schoolyard conversations to veer toward Madden and away from popular video game titles, like Minecraft.

We did this by creating content, not ads.

Our effort began with a five minute-long Bollywood action film, featuring our audience’s favorite comedic celebrities (Christopher ‘McLovin’ Mintz-Plasse and Dave Franco), NFL stars (Rob Gronkowski, Antonio Brown, Odell Beckham Jr., Colin Kaepernick and Rex Ryan), and a T-Rex. The film was followed by a five month-long spin-off series, starring our celebrities as puppets, teaming up to solve mysteries between heated games of Madden NFL 16. The series premiered an episode a week for 18 weeks of the NFL season.

In the end, we broke the Internet for two days, kept Madden in the conversation all season long, and set new sales records, effectively inviting a new generation of players into the Madden madness.

The Game

• #1-selling sports game of 2015

• #2-selling game of 2015

• Exceeded goal of increasing new user base by 10%

The Movie

• #1 on the #PopularOnYouTube list for two days (evidence that we broke the Internet for two days)

• Top trending topic on both Twitter and Facebook in the US

• Video views to date: 30MM and counting

• 65% of all YouTube views were organic

• Press: 500+ stories generated

The Puppets

• Video views to date: 630,000 total views (YouTube)

Understanding that digital and social media is the ideal vehicle for content in this day and age, we built branded content that was designed to be discovered and shared. We made a spectacle of everything our teen and twenty something audience loves, in a way they would want to tell others about. This resulted in creating a season-long extravaganza that was so ridiculous, it completely shattered the mold, combining the best of the Internet and the best of Madden in an over-the-top and entertaining package that challenged marketing best practices and changed the content-making game.

Looking closer at our 13-24-year-old target, we learned that they are not just less interested in Madden than older generations, but less interested in football overall.

This made it critical that we better understand our target and what they deem relevant in culture.

Through social listening audits, we noticed that “snackable” content isn’t the only content our audience watched. They often seek Internet breaking content that offers things they’ve never seen before. These often come in longer formats, like music videos, movie trailers, or YouTube influencer videos. PewDiePie, for example, consistently posts 10+ minute YouTube videos that are watched by 30MM+ people, many of whom are teens & twentysomethings, every week.

This got us thinking – why make ads that go short, when many of our audience’s top content creators go long?

Madden NFL is the most successful sports video game in history. But after 26 years, our core players were getting older (+4 years older than players of other top selling games). To avoid sales declines, we needed to reinvigorate Madden’s place in pop-culture .

We would have to convince attention-deprived teens & twenty-somethings (age 13-24) that a two and a half decade-old game was still worth their time, money, and attention.

Common best practices said the ideal way to reach younger gamers was with short “snackable” content. Most marketers have tried to copy the media format of Snapchat, Vine, and Twitter, focusing on duplicating bite-sized content young people create themselves. This type of content is meant for short distractions, and it’s while fun, it does nothing to build a brand.

Instead, we chose to create content that wasn’t just a “snackable” distraction, but designed to capture attention of a savvy, entertainment-obsessed audience.