Dave Madden of EA (far left), Rhiannon White of Shazam, Ashley Higgins of Sega, and Christian Limon of Glu Mobile.
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Games could become the largest ad platform for brands, EA exec says

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Mobile games are sucking a lot of advertising money out of other media, according to a panel of advertising experts at major game publishers. This is happening so much that Dave Madden, senior vice president of global media solutions at Electronic Arts’ mobile games division, believes that mobile gaming will be the “single largest advertising platform in the world.”

Madden is a natural optimist about mobile games and the growing amount of brand advertising in them, based on the discussion at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) this week in San Francisco. He likened advertising in games today to the advertising on ESPN when it was a fledgling cable television channel.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.