The advertising technology world may be getting a surprising new entrant: Electronic Arts.
Electronic Arts is hiring a key ad tech executive to streamline the company’s ad offerings. The move is the latest development in EA’s ad push, with CEO Andrew Wilson saying during the company’s fourth-quarter 2024 earnings call on May 8 that advertising is a “significant growth driver” for the company.
EA currently has four job openings for advertising technology roles, which were posted on various job sites between late May and the past few weeks. The positions are being filled at various EA offices, with the majority at the company’s headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. An Electronic Arts representative declined to comment on its hiring plans, pointing to Wilson’s earnings comment as the company’s statement on the matter.
“Everyone’s fear is that big bad EA will come in and implement this in a way that we don’t like, but it’s not in EA’s interest to do that,” said Kristan Rivers, CEO of in-game advertising company AdInMo. “We trust publishers to do what’s right for gamers, so we trust EA to do what’s right for gamers first.”
The job ads include openings for an ad tech program manager, an ad tech software engineer and a product manager for in-game data solutions. Another job ad for an integrations tech lead was listed as closed for applications as of July 1.
The job posting for an in-game Data Product Manager offers some insight into the motivations for the hire, with the successful candidate saying: [EA’s] “You will be responsible for building data flows and reporting processes, identifying advertiser needs first and foremost, then implementing solutions across multiple game studios and tech teams. Your role will be to define the strategy and roadmap for our ad tech program and ensure its success.”
In fact, working across multiple game studios seems to be a feature of many of EA’s ad tech jobs. In addition to the aforementioned product manager role, there’s also a platform engineering job, “assessing where and how EA’s live services solutions, studio tech stacks and vendor solutions can work together.” Vendor solutions engineers “use massive data sets from 20+ game studios to drive data-driven decision-making processes.” And integration technology leads, whose work “spans multiple game studios.” [EA’s] Great franchise and experience.”
The focus on integrating EA’s various studios and their ad services reflects one of the company’s biggest challenges in building out its advertising division. While EA has offered in-game ads within titles such as “EA Football” for years and has hired a dedicated sales team for this purpose, it doesn’t offer a simple, unified ad service. Instead, each EA studio has its own tech stack and suite of ad products, making it relatively complicated for the company to scale its ad business.
“This is a huge revenue driver for EA,” said Nina McKee, co-founder of agency WeGame2, who previously worked in partnerships and agency sales at in-game ad firms Bidstack, Admix and Gadsme. “With EA releasing fewer games this year, we think this is a really smart move for them to monetize over the next 12 months.”
One potential challenge for EA is that the majority of in-game ads it currently offers are hard-coded into the games, rather than programmatically placed across its various titles. If EA wants to grow its advertising business and make itself more accessible to more advertisers, it will need to ditch its existing direct sales approach and adopt a programmatic framework that is expected to bring in more brand ad dollars.
“I think that’s a smart move and that’s exactly what they’re doing,” McKee said. “If they do it right, they’re going to be influential enough in terms of player base that they’re going to crush most of the smaller ad tech companies out there.”
https://digiday.com/?p=549352
