Electronic Arts has announced a new initiative to add more advertising to its games, expanding on its already commercial-packed sports division. Calling this EA Advertising, the publisher declares this is a “space” where “brands come to play alongside” players.
“Players come to EA’s games and live experiences every day to play, watch, create and connect,” says the company’s (deep sigh) chief experiences offer, David Tinson. “That gives brands a meaningful opportunity to show up in ways that add value and respect the player experience, while maintaining authenticity in the worlds our teams are building.”
Boasting of the already vast amounts of ads including across EA Sports games like Madden and EA Sports FC, a press release issued by the publisher June 15 explains that EA Advertising will be “enabling brands to integrate directly into gameplay through dynamic, real-time placements, from stadium signage to custom in-game content, designed to enhance, not disrupt, the player experience.”
These will include “digital ad boards, scoreboards and brand broadcast overlays,” the latter of which sounds a lot like ad-reads during play, as well as “interactive moments, like in-game challenges, reward-driven objectives, and branded content.”
Partners already signed up to this include Visa, Lowe’s, Red Bull and Xfinity, along with Mountain Dew’s DEW University in College Football 26 “complete with a custom stadium, mascot, and reward ecosystem.”
History Lessons
Ads in sports games are hardly new, but the real emphasis here from EA is that EA Advertising is a fully-fledged platform where brands can sign up to incredibly specific and granular marketing campaigns with ads directly fed into games on the fly. And you can bet your butt that you’re the main product here, with a promise of “Enhanced targeting and measurement capabilities,” where EA’s new proprietary ad server and SDK” will match your data to the ads.
We have, of course, been here before, a number of times over the years. EA was first touting this specific scheme in 2024, but it was as recently as 2020 that the firm last received a massive backlash for tiresomely intrusive ads in UFC 4. I still remember everyone’s misery at the cack-handed use of billboard ads in Burnout Paradise in 2008, then before that in 2006 EA announced another similar “dynamic ads” deal that was intended to start with Need For Speed: Carbon and Battlefield 2042 (including utterly idiotic billboards for I Am Legend appearing on the battlegrounds), but that too quickly fizzled out.
If EA sticks to the EA Sports brand, this stands a much stronger chance of sticking than every previous effort, especially if they truly are just ways of replacing in-game ad hoardings alongside the embarrassing vanity items and promotional events we’ve already come to expect. Tech in the past put huge limitations on being able to do this, but that’s hardly an issue now. There’s a big effort in today’s press release to repeatedly insist how non-intrusive and un-interrupting these ads will be, likely in direct response to 2020’s farce of The Boys promos taking over the screen in the middle of games of UFC 4.
Either way, when you’ve paid $70 for a game, the idea that you then are still going to be bombarded by commercials as you play is pretty damned galling. There’s, of course, no mention in EA’s press release of this being used to offset game prices, or lower the cost of in-game items.