There’s a new announcement today from EA, but it’s not a fresh Battlefield or Titanfall game. Instead, the publishing giant has announced EA Advertising — a platform designed to place brands directly into its portfolio of popular sports titles, such as Madden NFL and EA Sports FC.
EA said its enormous audience of more than 120 million monthly players was the perfect place for companies to advertise at scale, through “dynamic, real-time placements, from stadium signage to custom in-game content, designed to enhance, not disrupt, the player experience.”
Brands could offer sponsored in-game challenges, EA suggested, with branded cosmetic items as rewards. Alternatively, companies could pay to sponsor on-pitch digital advertising boards, scoreboards, or broadcast overlays — just as sporting events are plastered with commercial sponsors in real life.
Within its games, EA says it can now offer a proprietary ad server and SDK [software development kit] tied to its in-house Frostbite engine, so advertisers can “improve targeting and gain deeper campaign insights.”
“Brands can activate across live environments, tailoring placements to meet campaign objectives, and update campaigns with ongoing optimization informed by aggregated engagement insights,” EA continued.
To be clear, the EA Advertising push seems focused on the company’s sports games for now — though there’s nothing to say that similar activity couldn’t eventually bleed elsewhere, such as to its hugely-successful The Sims, which recently featured a crossover with Netflix’s Bridgerton, or other EA games.
Companies already partnered with EA Advertising include Visa, Lowe’s, Red Bull, Mountain Dew, Xfinity and Peacock — all of which have previously featured sponsored content within EA Sports games in the past.
In-game advertising has become a hot topic of late, as gaming companies look to boost revenues at a time that margins are being squeezed harder than ever. Newly-hired Xbox chief strategy office Matthew Ball recently suggested that advertising could be added to Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, in order to offer them at lower price point.
“Ads should be used to offer more affordable alternatives alongside today’s ad-free experiences, in the hopes more could play as a result. Similar to how Netflix and Disney+ have ad-tiers with all the same content, but at half the price or so,” Ball wrote on social media, while cautioning that this did not mean “in-game ads” as he believed “interrupting the gameplay experience would be bad.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
