It’s Madden Season – a 3:30-minute epic 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 fans on Facebook saw him snipping Colin Kaepernick’s headphone cord. NBA star Damian Lillard wrote a Madden-infused hip-hop song that inspired copycats. By the time our long-form music video launched, our fans were ready.

Our video’s star, Kevin Hart, kicked off the broadcast portion of the campaign, introducing the long-form video during a live telecast of ESPN’s SportsCenter.

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.

- 36MM views to-date

- 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 15 experienced its best sales year in franchise history, becoming the #2 selling console game of 2014.

Madden NFL is the most successful (American) football franchise in video game history. But after 25 years, and minimal changes year to year, Madden had lost relevance among a prominent group of younger gamers (12-24) – who spend most of their time playing first-person shooters and action-adventure games.

In order to hit our sales goal for the year, we would have to reinvigorate the franchise by positioning Madden NFL 15 as a must-have title among Millennials.

Knowing competition is inherent in most video games, we re-centered our focus on the uniquely face-to-face nature of competition that makes Madden, Madden. This special breed of rivalry led us to the strategy that “Rivalry Elevates Everything.”

With this in mind, we set out to tell stories that celebrated rivalry and competition by tapping into topics our target loves even more than football: pop culture, celebrities, humor, and Internet culture.