Ad tech may be about to welcome a surprising new entrant: Electronic Arts.
Electronic Arts is making key ad tech hires that appear poised to streamline the company’s advertising offerings. This is the latest move by EA into the advertising space, after CEO Andrew Wilson said ads were a “significant growth driver” for the company during its Q4 2024 earnings call on May 8.
Currently, EA has four active job openings for advertising technician positions, which were posted on various job boards starting in late May and just a few weeks ago. The positions are spread across EA’s various offices, with the majority located at the company’s headquarters in Redwood City, California. A representative for Electronic Arts declined to comment on the hiring plans, noting that Wilson’s comments on the results were the company’s statement on the matter.
“Everyone is worried that the big bad EA is going to come along and implement this in a way that they might not like, but it’s not in their best interest,” said Kristan Rivers, CEO of in-game advertising firm AdInMo. “We trust a publisher to do what’s right for their players, so I trust EA to do what’s right for the players first.”
The job listings include openings for an ad tech program manager, ad tech software engineers, and a product manager for in-game data solutions. Another job listing, for an integrated technology manager, was marked as no longer accepting applications on July 1.
The game’s data product manager listing gives some insight into the motivation behind the hire, saying the hire will “reimagine [EA’s] “You will be responsible for managing data flows and reporting processes, starting with identifying advertiser needs and implementing solutions across multiple game studios and technical teams. Your role is essential to defining the strategy and roadmap for the advertising technology program and ensuring its success.”
Indeed, working across multiple game studios seems to be a feature of many of EA’s open ad tech positions. In addition to the aforementioned product manager role, there’s also the platform engineer, who will “evaluate where and how EA’s live service solutions, studio tech stacks, and vendor solutions can work together.” There’s the vendor solutions engineer, who will “use massive data sets from over 20 game studios to drive data-driven decision-making.” And then there’s the integrated technology manager, whose work will span “across the entire market.” [EA’s] incredible franchises and experiences.”
The focus on bringing together EA’s various studios and their ad offerings reflects one of the publisher’s biggest challenges in building its advertising business. While EA has long offered in-game advertising within titles like “EA FC” — and has a dedicated sales team for that purpose — it doesn’t have a single, unified ad offering. 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.
“It’s a significant revenue stream for EA,” said Nina Mackie, co-founder of agency WeGame2, who previously worked in partnerships and agency sales for gaming ad agencies Bidstack, Admix and Gadsme. “They’re going to be releasing fewer games this year, so over the next 12 months, I think it’s a very smart move for them to monetize.”
One potential challenge for EA is that the majority of its current in-game ad offerings are hard-coded into games rather than programmatically placed across titles. If EA wants to grow its ad business by making it more accessible to more advertisers, it will have to abandon its pre-existing direct sales approach in favor of a programmatic framework that promises to attract more ad dollars for brands.
“It would be a smart move, and I think that’s what they’re doing,” Mackie said. “If they can do that, they’ll have enough reach in terms of player base to eclipse most smaller ad tech companies.”
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