Heat and The Nerdery team up to make things personal

EA Sports’ Madden NFL series is a powerhouse in the gaming universe and as much a part of mainstream pop culture as any game has been over the past decade. When Heat, EA Sports’ agency partner based in San Francisco, approached The Nerdery to work on a Facebook app promoting Madden NFL ‘12, we were understandably psyched.

Heat’s Facebook app idea was “Madden ‘12 Smack Shack,” where users could send antagonistic wall posts to their friend/Madden rival. Our job was to implement their plans and deliver a product that surpassed EA Sports’ expectations.

At the heart of the app is giving users creative ways to taunt their rival. Working with Heat’s creative vision, we developed over 300 customizable combinations to make things personal and crank the rivalry up to 11.

Users can post an embedded video of prominent NFL players letting loose creative trash talk directed at the video’s recipient, and as you might expect, Jared Allen is a skilled trash talker. To give trash talk a more personal touch, users can create a customizable taunt. Want to check-in with your rival’s mom on the Las Vegas Strip? No problem. Perhaps you’d like to create an event to take their ex out shopping for hot pants? Of course you do. Or just maybe you’d rather set your relationship status with your rival’s wife as her “official” piggyback ride giver? Consider it done.

EA Sports opted to use the Facebook Content Delivery Network to host and deliver the videos. Due to the way Facebook’s CDM works, each video’s direct link changes on a daily basis, and would therefore lead to dead links within a day of posting. To solve the problem, we ended up creating an algorithm that cached the links for a limited amount of time and then obtained new links before the caches expired.

EA Sports was extremely satisfied with the final Smack Shack product, which also linked directly to their online store where users purchase the game. Shortly after launch, Heat contacted The Nerdery and informed us that EA Sports was not only happy with the results, but were already planning their next Facebook application. Knowing the ideas Heat comes up with, we can’t wait to be a part of it.