John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts took the stage at the Ad Age Digital conference to make a pitch to advertisers: in terms of reach, games are bigger than all forms of entertainment, even and especially TV. “People spend a lot more time with video games than anything else,” Riccitiello said, offering previews of this fall’s coming realistic-looking Battlefield 3 game and Star Wars Old Republic, which are meant to challenge Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft.
To sell the attendees on his pitch, Riccitiello rattled off a string of stats and had plenty of bar charts showing gamers in general and EA’s audience in particular trending up and up.
For example, he said there are 1.5 billion consumers for gamers today and it should hit 3 billion in the next five years — just about half the world’s population.
“The number one category is applications for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Facebook is games,” he said. EA went to Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and said “that little black screen could support a simple game.” So the two collaborated on bringing Scrabble to Kindle last fall. “We outsold the best-selling book on Kindle with our game,” Riccitiello said.
So what does all this success mean for in-game advertising? Sure games may have more reach to consumers than TV, but the ad dollars are overwhelmingly spent on broadcast and cable, not games. “We’re at the very early stage for this kind of media,” Riccitiello said. “We’ve been more focused on selling to consumers.” Later on, in a Q&A with AdAge editor Abbey Klaassen, Riccitiello added that “Game makers have been reluctant to work with advertisers, mainly because developers don’t want to clutter up their field with other things.”
He did highlight some notable campaigns EA has participated in the past few years, such as an Obama for president ad campaign that made it into some EA games during the 2008 race for White House. “That’s not to say anything about the politics of our company, but I guess it worked.”
Considering the popularity of games, especially among younger consumers, versus TV, will the NFL lockout have any impact on EA’s successful Madden Football series? “Who knows, by next fall, we may be the only place where viewers go to get football, but I’m not sure if the lockout will help or hurt though.”

Comments have been disabled for this post