Zynga has led the charge for social gaming, which has really grown in the past several months. Between popular games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, Zynga reached an estimated 225 million active users per month and is expected to earn $600 million in revenue in 2010.
With all of this achieved, Zynga is looking to work on an even larger scale and change into a media business. Working with ad network SocialVibe, they hope to reward users that do tasks for brands, like filling out a survey and watching a video.
“We have a product that allows brand marketers to have their own custom engagement,” said Michael Comerford, head of Zynga’s ad efforts (and a former Google sales exec). “I like to call this opportunity ‘on-game’ advertising as opposed to ‘in-game’ advertising.”
Zynga was criticized for some of its ad offers last year, but now they’ve relaunched them at a higher quality, they believe. While certain specialty offers (like buying flowers for Mother’s Day) are temporary and limited, other brand engagements can happen every day. “The opportunity is orders of magnitude larger in the brand space than the direct-response space,” said Comerford.
While Zynga had some success running a promotion for Public Enemies in Mafia Wars, generating 55 million brand interactions, it can be hard to rate the medium. Weaving a brand into a game is also difficult to scale and there are no universal metrics to share with other ad companies.
“The work it takes to do a custom integration is fairly intensive,” said Comerford. “We’ve only had a few instances where the opportunity met that threshold for investment.”
Early results are promising for Zynga, with over 80 percent of those who start a brand engagement completing it. Café World promotion let users write a review of a local business found through YellowBook.com, with a cost per completed review at less than a quarter compared to other online marketing programs.
“If we can transfer [people’s] passion of playing games to advertisers, then they’re totally engaging with the advertising,” said Joe Marchese, president of SocialVibe. “That attention transfer is not something most digital advertising systems can do.”
Microsoft has even looked towards snagging FarmVille users by offering Farm Cash in exchange for becoming a Facebook fan of Bing, netting 425,000 fans. Still, the time consuming nature of these games has some wondering how long they will remain appealing and the value of these incentivizing campaigns is still unclear.
“That’s a question that’s open right now,” Comerford said. “We can bring them an audience that’s willing to listen. If the engagement is quality, they’ll be able to convert a high percentage of those.”
Source: AdWeek
