The holiday season is the proving ground for media owners. It pays well and punishes hard. Electronic Arts is selling ads through this stretch for the first time as a real business unit rather than a side project. The next 10 weeks are a stress test for the thesis behind that move.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Four months after launching its ad business, the gaming company is rolling out \u201cMoments of Play\u201d \u2014 a single-buy package that bundles ad units in premium gaming environments with brand integration opportunities across EA\u2019s portfolio, letting brands connect with highly engaged players across EA\u2019s portfolio.<\/p>\n
Starting with the 2026 holiday period, the offering will span top franchises including EA Sports FC 27, EA Sports College Football 27 and skate, with the company planning to extend it to other tentpole moments throughout the year, including major sports events and game launches.<\/p>\n
The portfolio approach is central to how EA wants brands to buy gaming media. Rather than requiring advertisers to pick a specific title, the company can use dynamic media placements across its games to reach a particular audience across both console and mobile.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoments is definitely going to be a part of our offerings going forward,\u201d said Alex Dao, vp of advertising and sponsorships at EA.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The pitch is based on EA\u2019s observation that players aren\u2019t equally engaged all year. Engagement across its games increases by an average of 25% during the holiday period, according to the games publisher\u2019s own internal data, which is why the company wants to capitalize on those spikes in attention by way of media opportunities for brands. For that to happen, though, Dao said he believes there\u2019s two levels of education that advertisers need about ads in the gaming environment.<\/p>\n
The first level is essentially that brands understand individual game integrations, especially through sports, because they already know what audience they can reach within a specific game. The second is getting marketers to think beyond individual game titles when they are trying to reach a particular audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost advertisers do not plan around individual game titles. They plan around audiences, outcomes and operational efficiency,\u201d said Nikhil Lai, principal analyst, performance marketing at Forrester. \u201cThe reality is that a CMO is more likely to ask for \u2018sports and gaming audiences at scale\u2019 than \u2018Madden inventory\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some advertisers want big custom integrations and experiential moments, while others are looking for the targeting, measurement and scale they\u2019re accustomed to buying from conventional digital media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest barrier to gaming advertising hasn\u2019t been audience demand, but execution,\u201d said Lai. \u201cBrands may want to reach gaming audiences, but fragmented inventory, custom integrations, inconsistent measurement and difficult media-planning workflows can make those audiences harder to buy at scale. A coordinated package like Moments of Play is designed to make that process more familiar by bundling access across multiple franchises and moments into a single buy.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s those more scalable offerings which EA sees as an opportunity to make gaming media more accessible to advertisers that may not have the appetite, or the time, for a custom gaming activation. EA has already offered programmatic buying across its mobile games and is now extending more dynamic capabilities to its console and PC titles. That\u2019s particularly important because, as Dao explained, \u201cHD is definitely an area that we see the most interest from marketers,\u201d pointing to the \u201cpremium audience\u201d on platforms such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe opportunity for us is to map where we see a lot of engagement in our games to the moment and the things that marketers care about,\u201d Dao said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The holiday season is the proving ground for media owners. It pays well and punishes hard. Electronic Arts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[85,46,85419,125],"class_list":["post-616554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-marketing-on-platforms","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}