Exactly a year ago, our team at YinzCam went into an unprecedented phase, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sports, as knew it, paused, as the world grappled with the reality of the pandemic.
With fans suddenly quarantined at home, we looked for a way to keep them engaged with their favorite teams, even if the pandemic temporarily prevented their teams from taking to the court/pitch/field. We wanted to be of use to our teams and to be of value to their fans.
A simple, but effective, idea was a digital card-match game, commonly known as a “game of memory” or “matching pairs” game. It’s something that all of us have played at some point or the other. A number of cards are laid face down on a surface, and you turn over those cards two at a time to see if they match. If the two face-up cards are identical, you leave them face-up, and move on to uncovering more pairs of identical cards. If the two face-up cards are not identical, you flip them back to face them down, and start all over again. It’s a race against time to remember the positions of all of the previously-uncovered cards and to be able to match them as rapidly as you can.
Within the first week of the pandemic, we built and launched a digital version of this popular card-match game with over a dozen sports teams. Fans would race against a digital clock that informed them of the number of seconds and the number of moves they had expended to win the game. Our clients embraced the feature, and designed some unique images for the cards, including team symbols, mascot images, team flags, iconic stadium images, and more. It was terrific to see the Philadelphia Eagles play off their branding to call it the “Bird Brain Memory Game.”
The digital card-match game was just one of the new initiatives that we rolled out in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s one, though, that remains special to us — it was a new product that we built and launched within days of the quarantine, in order to be of the most use to our clients at a challenging time for the industry and fans alike.
