Electronic Arts claims Twitter ads exceeded expectations

In September, Electronic Arts (EA) became the second brand in the UK, after Sky, to roll out a promoted tweet, to push its FIFA 12 video game.

It has released statistics that show its promoted trend received an engage-ment level of 11%, well above Twitter’s average ‘benchmark’ for trends, of 3% to 6%.

Twitter defines the metric for engagement based on the number of times the promoted product is clicked on, re-tweeted, replied to or ‘favourited’ by users.

The EA promoted tweets coincided with the creation of a promoted account for EA Sports FIFA on 29 September.

It also ran promoted tweets the next day and launched a ‘#fifasundays’ promoted trend on 2 October to capitalise on conversations on Twitter about the Tottenham vs Arsenal football match that day.

EA claimed it sparked ‘thousands’ of conversations within minutes of the trend going live that Sunday evening.

It also reported higher-than-average engagement levels for its promoted tweets, averaging 8.3% over the two-week campaign; significantly more than Twitter’s benchmark of 1.5% for such tweets.

One of the promoted tweets asked followers to ‘retweet if you are picking up a copy of FIFA 12 soon’ and achieved an engagement level of 15%.

Since the launch of the campaign, EA Sports FIFA has increased its Twitter following by 25%, to 105,000.

Daniel Brown, associate director at MediaCom, the agency behind the campaign, said it ‘exceeded expectations’ in terms of engagement. The key to its success, he claimed, was creating time-sensitive ads with a ‘call to action’. 

EA, which is set to launch an ecommerce store to sell its games, has since rolled out Twitter ads for its Battlefield 3 title. Other brands to have used the ad products in the UK include Marks & Spencer and Eurostar.

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk