Electronic Arts is bundling its games to make a bigger pitch to advertisers

Starting with the 2026 holiday period, the offering will span top franchises including EA Sports FC 27, EA Sports College Football 27 and skate, with the company planning to extend it to other tentpole moments throughout the year, including major sports events and game launches.

The portfolio approach is central to how EA wants brands to buy gaming media. Rather than requiring advertisers to pick a specific title, the company can use dynamic media placements across its games to reach a particular audience across both console and mobile.

“Moments is definitely going to be a part of our offerings going forward,” said Alex Dao, vp of advertising and sponsorships at EA. 

The pitch is based on EA’s observation that players aren’t equally engaged all year. Engagement across its games increases by an average of 25% during the holiday period, according to the games publisher’s own internal data, which is why the company wants to capitalize on those spikes in attention by way of media opportunities for brands. For that to happen, though, Dao said he believes there’s two levels of education that advertisers need about ads in the gaming environment.

The first level is essentially that brands understand individual game integrations, especially through sports, because they already know what audience they can reach within a specific game. The second is getting marketers to think beyond individual game titles when they are trying to reach a particular audience.

“Most advertisers do not plan around individual game titles. They plan around audiences, outcomes and operational efficiency,” said Nikhil Lai, principal analyst, performance marketing at Forrester. “The reality is that a CMO is more likely to ask for ‘sports and gaming audiences at scale’ than ‘Madden inventory’.”

Some advertisers want big custom integrations and experiential moments, while others are looking for the targeting, measurement and scale they’re accustomed to buying from conventional digital media. 

“The biggest barrier to gaming advertising hasn’t been audience demand, but execution,” said Lai. “Brands may want to reach gaming audiences, but fragmented inventory, custom integrations, inconsistent measurement and difficult media-planning workflows can make those audiences harder to buy at scale. A coordinated package like Moments of Play is designed to make that process more familiar by bundling access across multiple franchises and moments into a single buy.”

It’s those more scalable offerings which EA sees as an opportunity to make gaming media more accessible to advertisers that may not have the appetite, or the time, for a custom gaming activation. EA has already offered programmatic buying across its mobile games and is now extending more dynamic capabilities to its console and PC titles. That’s particularly important because, as Dao explained, “HD is definitely an area that we see the most interest from marketers,” pointing to the “premium audience” on platforms such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox.

“The opportunity for us is to map where we see a lot of engagement in our games to the moment and the things that marketers care about,” Dao said.