• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 30, 2010

Electronic Arts (EA) plans to unveil Thursday a cross-platform reporting dashboard that pulls in data and assists advertisers in allocating ad buys and budgets across the company's online, console, and mobile properties, as well as email and social sites. The white-label platform designed and built by nPario can integrate more than a dozen data sources to help EA's clients understand consumer intent and the impact of their campaigns. The features offer an overview of key campaign performance, segmented audience insights, and assessments on social media sentiment.

Source data from Dynamic Logic or Nielsen's Homescan Panel easily integrates into the dashboard. The brand Dr. Pepper, in the midst of a multimillion-dollar campaign across multiple EA channels, has been testing the platform. As the platform is populated with more data, EA will have an option to benchmark success relative to overall campaigns across the channels. Clients can choose to have specific time segments analyzed and the data exported into Excel charts.

Understanding what comprises unduplicated audiences also creates challenges for cross-platform campaigns. By tagging an online campaign with Collective Media's tags, EA can analyze age, gender and income across the entire campaign and within specific channels. The platform will calculate the campaign reach by demographics and compare the profiles to the total online segments relative to Playfish, Pogo or Facebook audiences.

Marketers need help wading through complexities and evaluating platforms to determine how to allocate budgets, according to Elizabeth Harz, EA's senior vice president of global media sales. "It was crucial to solve the problem and remove some of the pain from data dumps that marketers receive from multiple platforms," she says. "We needed to provide greater insight before clients would increase investments."

Part of the process meant bringing in-game advertising in-house from Microsoft's ad company Massive, Harz says. EA needed access to the data sources.

Aggregating data and finding the correct medium in a variety of fragmented channels to reach consumers became more difficult than first believed, with the advent of Apple's iPhone and tablets like iPad. nPario, less than a year old, built the system to collect and segment the data into target audiences based on interest. The platform allows EA to crunch an infinite amount of data and package it up for its clients.

EA's campaign insights suite will analyze cross-platform campaign performance, brand impact and social buzz, and when and where available will track return on investment across the publisher's network of sites. Marketers and advertisers will have insight into how campaigns run on each channel.

nPario CEO and co-founder Bassel Ojjeh, who came from Yahoo, holds an "exclusive license for the technology to get brands like EA up and running on this platform," which took about four years to build. In a white paper, the former Yahoo executive and colleagues detail how data insights on consumer behavior, product performance and in marketplaces drive innovation and competition on the Internet. Aside from EA, nPario's customers list includes Umniah and Jawwal, two fast-growing telecom providers in EMEA.