EA VP wants developers to design games around ads from day one

EA's VP of advertising and sponsorships Alexander Dao says the games industry is sitting on a massive untapped advertising opportunity — and that developers should be thinking about ad integration before they write a single line of code, not as an afterthought.

Dao made the comments on The Game Business Show, where he argued that retrofitting ads into existing games is the hard way to do it. Building ad experiences into a game from the ground up makes them feel more native, gives brands more flexibility, and opens up more partnership options. He pointed to the free-to-play Skate reboot as exactly the kind of project where that approach makes sense. EA's advertising platform, announced last month, is baked directly into Frostbite — the engine behind Madden, Battlefield, and EA Sports FC — and lets brands collaborate with EA to target players, track engagement, and measure campaign performance using standards verified by Integral Ad Science. Early activations include a Mountain Dew stadium experience in EA Sports College Football 26, Visa branding in EA Sports FC, and a Lowe's-sponsored Stadium Pulse feature that Dao says racked up over a billion impressions.

Dao is careful to frame this as context-sensitive rather than a blanket ad injection strategy. Sports games are the clearest fit — stadium boards, broadcast placements, and branded kits already exist in real life, so replicating them in-game feels authentic rather than intrusive. He drew the line at something like Nike trainers appearing in Mass Effect, calling that pushing it too far. The Sims 4 offered a more interesting test case: a deal with luxury brand Coach added free branded bags and clothes to the game, and players responded positively because it matched what the community actually wanted. Whether that goodwill holds as EA scales the platform across more titles remains the real question.

The broader pitch — that gaming should follow advertising dollars the way social media and search did — will land differently depending on who's listening. Players in premium, story-driven games are a harder sell than those logging hundreds of hours in live-service titles, and Dao's own examples lean heavily on sports and free-to-play. EA says it's measuring player engagement and brand sentiment with every activation and iterating from there, so expect the scope of the platform to expand as those numbers come in.