ORLANDO, FL: Electronic Arts, the gaming specialist, has yielded various benefits from managing certain media-buying responsibilities in-house.

Belinda Smith, Director/Global Media Activation at Electronic Arts, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) 2017 Media Conference.

More specifically, she reported that the firm handles programmatic buying internally, even as it continues to work with agencies on above-the-line media.

"We're taking everything that we already know about our players – all the data that we have on our business – and actually tying that to media in a meaningful way," Smith said. (For more details, read Warc's exclusive report: Electronic Arts data grounds in-house media buying.)

EA's deep understanding of user behaviour – ranging from device type to what time they play, for how long, what they've accomplished and if they make in-game purchases – assists this process.

"When people interact with our games and play our games, they spit off so much data," Smith told the Orlando, Florida audience.

And, thanks to this incoming stream of information, EA can very precisely target its messaging to granular consumer groups.

"We can say 'I want people who only play the toddlers in Sims, and play for at least two hours a day, and prefer to play on the computer'," Smith said.

"I want to know if I can actually get those people onto a console or into a mobile game that's a little tangential to that.

"We're able to test that out because we can manage our dataset in-house in a much more nuanced way."

Among the broader information feeds that are helping EA progress are cross-platform metrics, unified audience insights and full-funnel attribution.

"It made sense for us to manage identity at the brand level," Smith said. "We're able to use that data in multiple platforms ... and get really specific and nuanced about what we want to test."

Data sourced from Warc