“Everybody says they want to make data-informed decisions. But what we quickly realized is, you have to have a lot of confidence in the information,” says Julie Foster, senior vice-president & managing director, Electronic Arts Experiences. “These things need to be well understood and accessible for it to really influence decisions.”
Foster, who leads EA’s global consumer-facing business, described a familiar challenge for marketers: the churn of which metrics actually matter. With a portfolio spanning EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, The Sims, Battlefield and more, each operating like its own mini-business, the company needed to align around consistent, trusted measurement.
Working with Analytic Partners, EA set out to create a comprehensive commercial model – one that empowered every team, from finance to franchise leads, to make confident, data-backed decisions.
“We were very clear. This is a tool for decisioning. It’s commercial-based. This is not a back-of-house analytics thing that only our data and analytics team is going to look at. We want it to empower us all to make business decisions,” says Foster.
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That approach required what Foster calls change management at scale: frequent, transparent communication and tailored storytelling to help teams see how the data would directly support their own goals.
The result? “It was even faster than we thought. I was so paranoid it was going to be very difficult,” she says. “But we put in a lot of work… people are very receptive to things that will help their job go better and get to their outcomes faster.”
The conversation offers an inside look at how EA built organizational trust in data – and why culture, not just analytics, fuels transformation. Catch the full video here.
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Analytic Partners
Analytic Partners is the leader in Commercial Analytics. Our platform, GPS-Enterprise provides adaptive solutions for deeper business understanding, right-time planning,...