James Ricker

Product & Marketingleadership for what'snext.

VP at Electronic Arts. Over the past 20 years I have led in-house creative teams, patented an in-game replay editor, and shipped the apps and platforms that turned EA's campaigns into daily habits for millions of players. Now focused on how AI is transforming the way we develop products and bring them to market globally.

James Ricker

About

I've spent twenty years at the intersection of product and marketing, and have experienced a consistent truth: the best marketing doesn't come from an ad, it comes from something that genuinely connects to and inspires people and, wherever possible, improves their experience of the product. When you can innovate and build an experience in service of your audience, instead of interrupting them with something they want to skip, they'll willingly engage, and the business results follow.

As Head of Creative for EA's global marketing, I helped stand up the company's first in-house creative studio, leading a globally distributed creative team of producers, creative leads, editors, sound designers, motion designers, and copywriters. For three years we produced the media and content for every campaign across EA's blockbuster portfolio, from Battlefield 1 and Apex Legends to FIFA and The Sims, plus event content for E3, EA PLAY, and Gamescom.

Once the studio was up and running, I turned my attention to Marketing Innovation, where we stopped asking players to watch and started giving them something to do. Our first venture was NFS Heat Studio, which turned the wait between reveal and launch into a daily habit: 1.48 million players in its first ten weeks, 3.5 million installs across its lifespan, over five million cars customized, and nearly 200,000 launch trailers personalized around each player's own customized car. EA SPORTS Highlighter was next, putting capture-and-share tools directly into the game, generating 124 million replays in FC 25, work that earned a granted U.S. patent for its innovative design.

From there I took on EA.com, the digital home of every EA franchise, and led a ground-up rebuild off a legacy CMS onto a modern stack. Our users across our lead titles grew 189% in the first year, organic traffic grew 4.6x, and then more than doubled again the year after. To pair with this, we took our internal Creator Network and transformed it into the Support-A-Creator program. In its first year the program delivered multi-million-dollar net new revenue with the best return on ad spend of any partnership activation in the company's history.

Most recently I have held the title of VP of the EA SPORTS App, leading a global team focused on bringing players closer to the real world of sport.

And because I believe the best way to understand where the future is going is to take part in it, I have personally been building with AI over the past two years. In 2025 I shipped omychef, and this year have developed agntchat, a messaging platform for agents across all three clients: desktop, web, and mobile.

AI is the deepest shift I've seen in twenty years of building products and marketing them, and it's only accelerating. I plan to keep building right at the front of it.

Experience

Jul 2025 – Present

Electronic Arts · Cologne

VP, EA SPORTS App

  • Lead a global team of designers, product leads, developers, project managers, and strategists building the EA SPORTS App, EA's platform for bringing players closer to the real world of sport.
  • Drive engagement beyond the core game through match predictions, virtual play-by-play, and card-collector-style Moments tied to live match events.
  • Shipped a revival of Sensible Soccer as a playable in-app experience timed to the 2026 World Cup.

Jun 2022 – Jul 2025

Electronic Arts · Cologne

Sr. Director, EA.com & Creator Network

  • Led the ground-up rebuild of EA's global web platform, the home of every EA franchise and visited by millions of fans monthly, moving off a legacy Adobe CMS onto a modern Contentful + TypeScript stack and templatizing the build process so new franchise sites could launch in days instead of months.
  • Grew users on lead titles by 189% in the first full year post-rebuild, with organic traffic up 4.6x; the following year more than doubled those gains again. Average session duration rose 94% and engagement per session rose 82%.
  • Reimagined the Creator Network and launched the Support-A-Creator program with The Sims as pilot title, delivering multi-million-dollar gross revenue in year one with the best ROAS of any partnership activation to date.

Jun 2019 – Jun 2022

Electronic Arts · Cologne

Sr. Director, Marketing Innovation

  • Led the team behind EA SPORTS Highlighter, giving FC players tools to turn in-game replays into shareable highlight reels without leaving the game, adopted by 41% of console/PC players, generating 124M replays and 92M highlight views, with 3.4M customized videos saved to the cloud. Later selected as the core camera system for EA SPORTS FC's "Project Assist."
  • Built NFS Heat Studio, a standalone customization app for Need for Speed Heat: 1.48M unique players in its first ten weeks, 4–5 logins/player/day, 24-minute average daily sessions, 5M+ cars customized, and 200K personalized launch-day trailers featuring players' own cars. Sustained daily engagement for nearly two years post-launch.

Jun 2016 – Jun 2019

Electronic Arts · Cologne

Head of Creative, Global Marketing

  • Helped stand up EA's first in-house creative studio and led the creative team behind it: a globally distributed group of producers, creative leads, editors, sound designers, motion designers, and copywriters.
  • For three years the studio produced the media for every marketing campaign across EA's portfolio, from Battlefield 1 and Apex Legends to FIFA, Star Wars, The Sims, and Need for Speed, plus event content for E3, EA PLAY, and Gamescom: hundreds of videos, with single trailers reaching tens of millions of views.

Apr 2014 – Jun 2016

Electronic Arts · Cologne

Marketing Art Director

  • Designed and directed all campaign content for Need for Speed (2015), leading a team of editors and cinematic artists to lift content quality and drive all-time highs in time-watched.

Earlier Career

Cinematic Director, NFS Rivals at Criterion Games, Guildford UK2013 – 2014
Cinematics Director & Lead Designer, Galactic Reign at Slant Six Games, Vancouver2012
Director, SSX E3 Trailer at Image Engine Design2011
Director of Photography (Sleeping Dogs) / Cinematic Lead (ModNation Racer) at United Front Games, Vancouver2009 – 2011
Cinematic Artist / Director / VFX Lead at Electronic Arts (NFS Undercover, NFS Pro Street, Skate, NBA Homecourt, Facebreaker, EA Active)2005 – 2009
Director / Cinematographer at CBC Television, "Little Claus & Big Claus"2004 – 2005

Core strengths

Marketing & Product Innovation
Global Team Leadership
Web Platform Modernization
Creator & Partnership Programs
Data-Driven Growth
Brand & Campaign Strategy
Cross-Functional Delivery
Storytelling & Creative Direction