Let’s All Go Home Because the Madden Movie Is the Best Content Marketing of All Time

You know when something is so absurd that it might be brilliant? That’s the only way to describe “Madden: The Movie.”

A few hours ago, EA Sports dropped a five-minute promo video for Madden NFL 16, the latest installment of the most popular football video game series. It has everything you’ll ever need: Dave Franco with a mustache, Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski shooting footballs out of a weaponized ball machine, and, to top it off, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick doing a horrendous impression of Al Pacino’s character from Scent of a Woman.

It makes no sense. Rex Ryan gets killed by a football. If EA Sports made this into a full-length movie, I’d see it nine times. I’m actually a little scared how perfectly the combination of football players, C-list actors, and absurdist comedy suits our editorial team. Our departmental Slack chats mostly just consist of riffs about these topics and allusions to Point Break. We just weren’t smart enough to turn them into content marketing.

Not only will this video make Joe Lazauskas’s upcoming Best Branded Content of August, but whenever he decides to start a Best Branded Content Hall of Fame, I’m going to vote for this to be the first selection.