Mythical Games · NFL Rivals · 2023

NFL RIVALS

Building a mobile football game’s voice inside NFL culture, in real time.

Client: Mythical Games
Timeline: Early 2023 through the 2023 season
Agency: Subnation
Role: Strategy / Social / Partnerships

NFL Rivals is Mythical Games’ mobile football game, where players build, own and trade a roster of NFL player cards. Its audience sat at the meeting point of three worlds: NFL fans, mobile and console football gamers, and web3 early adopters.

With Subnation, we ran the brand’s social presence through the 2023 offseason, the Season 0 launch at the NFL Draft and into the season: the strategy, the publishing across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Discord, the community, and the partners.

My Contribution

As Sr. Director Marketing at Subnation

StrategyManaged digital and community marketing for the game launch.

Digital marketingWrote the offseason Twitter growth plan and the digital publishing playbook.

ChannelsRan publishing and community across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Discord.

Season 0 launchRan sponsored posts around the 2023 NFL Draft for the Season 0 launch.

Launch streamRan the sponsored launch stream with MMG, which drew 44K views.

The Films

Hover to preview. Click to watch with sound.

The Work

Chapter by chapter. Click an image to enlarge.

February 2023

Offseason Twitter growth

The core audience lived on football Twitter, talking about the game and its storylines around the clock. The plan put Rivals in that conversation every week of the offseason with an always on program.

Weekly threads telling the Rivals story
Football conversations that proved the brand belonged
Gameplay content featuring popular teams
Monthly partner streams that closed with a live Spaces event
#WeekendRivalry polls on the NFL’s great matchups
Weekly growth giveaways

See the full deck →

April 2023

Season 0 at the NFL Draft

Season 0 launched alongside the 2023 NFL Draft. We reskinned every brand channel to look and feel like a native part of the Draft, then went live across all three Draft days.

A Draft themed Road to the Draft activation for the Discord community
The launch video across social and YouTube
An install window giveaway and free cards for the top 100 players
A sponsored launch stream with MMG
NFL influencers featuring the launch during the Draft

See the full deck →

July 2023

The digital publishing playbook

For the next stage of the brand, we rewrote how Rivals published. Rich, connected storytelling over a high volume of copy and paste posts.

Less is more: lower volume, more oversight and creativity
Bespoke content for every platform, one story across them
Promote the stories inside the packs instead of pushing sales
Draft off the NIL partners who drove the strongest engagement
A balance of 50% execute, 30% extend and 20% react

Channel roles

Twitter for real time connection, Instagram as the magazine, Facebook as the commercial engine, TikTok as the story playground.

See the full deck →

Through the season

Always on

Week to week, we landed the live ops calendar, hosted player and athlete AMAs, and managed the community across every channel. Weekly reports tracked sentiment, bugs, app reviews and Discord activity so the team could act on what players were saying.