Electronic Arts has been quietly slotting ads into its sports games for a while, and now its advertising boss wants the next batch of games designed with those ads baked in from the very start.
The company only formalized its whole in-game ad operation last month, as it folded one-off brand deals into a single platform called EA Advertising and wired an ad server straight into its Frostbite engine.
So far, that has meant retrofitting billboards and overlays into games that already exist. Speaking on The Game Business Show, EA’s advertising VP suggested the next step reaches further back, into the games that haven’t been built yet.
EA’s ad chief wants brand space in games planned from day one
Alexander Deo, EA’s VP of advertising and sponsorship, told host Christopher Dring that most of EA’s current work amounts to “retrofitting it back in,” since the games were finished long before anyone thought about where a brand might sit.
(Conversation starts at around 18:20)
New titles, he argued, offer a cleaner slate. “As you think about new games that are coming out… if you actually design them with the right advertising and brand experience in there from the get-go, it just makes it easier and makes it feel more native,” Deo said. “It creates more flexibility in the types of brands that can come in and out.”
He tied the idea straight back to the platform EA just launched, explaining that building ad tools into Frostbite lets brands drop in and out of games “in a much more flexible, creative and dynamic way” rather than waiting on a patch.
Deo kept circling back to player value throughout, insisting the ads have to feel authentic to the game, and he pointed to EA’s free-to-play Skate as the kind of title where advertising can be built in early rather than bolted on later.
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Whether players see it that way is another matter, especially since EA already faced questions when it rolled ads into EA Sports FC, Madden, and College Football, and audiences elsewhere have made their feelings clear, with YouTube viewers bluntly telling the platform its stream ads “suck.”
