EA vice president of advertising says game ads are a 'huge opportunity', but it 'has to make sense for the game'

EA announced it'd be creating a whole new platform for advertising last month, something I'm sure has you so excited you're jumping out of your seat and clicking your heels. You might be potentially doing a little dance and saying 'yipee!' Personally speaking, the very thought exhausts me, though Alexander Dao, EA's vice president of advertising and sponsorship, at least has somewhat of a measured stance towards it.

That's via an interview with The Game Business. In it, Dao says that ads in games are "a huge opportunity, not just for EA but broadly, because most of the games that have been around for a while, building the advertising experience is really retrofitting it in."

He uses the example of the most recent Skate, a game that hit the industry like a corporate brick and, as our own Kara Phillips said, feels like it was made by people in suits. Still, Dao maintains that if "you actually design them with the right advertising and brand experience in there from the get-go, it just makes it easier. It makes it feel more native and it creates more flexibility in the types of brands that can come in and out."

As for what the new platform means for videogames, Dao says that they're trying to "standardize some of this." Mainly in terms of viewability standards and the ability to share reports back to the company they're advertising for, so they're "seeing consistency." Basically, justifying the obscene amount of cash that gets spent in routine advertisements each year.

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But that standardization presents a problem, because "it has to make sense for the game" says Dao. A statement that both gives me some relief, and a little bit of anxiety—like watching a vampire figure out that it needs to be polite in order to get invited in. Not that I'm comparing advertising executives to vampires. I would never do that.

"It’s easier to imagine what that looks like with sports because what you’re really trying to do is mirror the real-world experience. But if we pull on the thread of… how do we actually understand what the players want? The progression? And can brands be a part of that experience?"

The example Dao uses is in The Sims, which had a collaboration with Coach that involved nine free items with Coach branding on them: "We did some surveys to understand what type of brands they would actually want to see in the game. Where is there good overlap in audience? And if a brand were to come in, what’s the right way for them to do it? And what we did with Coach was democratize access to their products to The Sims community."

And, listen. I am dangerously close to giving Dao kudos here, because in the interest of fairness—if I were a Sims player that was into fashion, I'd probably be pretty happy to be given free clothes and accessories in exchange for the understanding I was being advertised to. Is it worse than, say, being asked to shell out money for a collab between games? I dunno, man.

But when Dao says eminently reasonable things like "it is a bit nuanced title-by-title to make sure that you’re getting it right and it doesn’t feel random", I do still feel like a frog being boiled in a pot. Mostly because advertising—as shown by, say, subscription-based streaming services having the gall to put ads in when you're already paying a sub—has a way of escalating things.