DMW Vlog: EA's Manny Anekal on In-Game Ads

Authored by Jay Baage on September 29, 2008 - 3:58pm.

New York - Manny Anekal, Global Dir, In-Game Ad Ops, Electronic Arts (NASD: ERTS) spoke on a panel entitled "Games as a Marketing Tool - Connecting Brands with the Favorite Medium of the Millennial Generation" at the NY Games Conference last week. DMW caught up with him afterwards and talked about opportunities for advertisers and brands to reach consumers through games, virtual worlds and social networks. Some of the take-aways include that in-game ads are still very much a nascent phenomena, but EA is seeing rapid growth in terms of in-game ad revenue with a very high profit margin. Some of the obstacles to overcome includes that the ad industry needs to learn the game development process and vice versa and there needs to be some kind of universal metrics for measuring the effectiveness of in-game ads. Anekal also mentions the need for gamers who think that EA's games are getting too expensive to buy to understand that EA needs to make these deals in order to fund the escalating costs of developing top-notch games as opposed to putting all the revenue towards lowering the price of the games on the store shelves. Hence, the benefit to consumers will be better and more authentic games rather then cheaper games.