STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
Social networking sites have become a big place for people to play games, and where there are eyeballs there are going to be advertisers. Social games are the ones you play with your friends on sites like Facebook and they're a hot new marketing target. But companies are not necessarily posting traditional banner ads. They are actually embedding the ads inside the games.
As NPR's Shereen Meraji reports, you'll be seeing a long more of them.
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SHEREEN MERAJI: If you recognize that tune, you are one of the 97 million Facebook users who play CityVille.
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MERAJI: It's free to play. You start with an empty plot of land and build a city on it. You invite your Facebook friends to join in the fun and soon find yourself spending time collecting rent, building businesses, growing and harvesting crops.
PAUL VERNA: I am not a player of social games, I have to say. I don't really have any extra time to plant virtual crops or race around Car Town.
MERAJI: That is unless you're busy analyzing the business of social games, which is what Paul Verna does for eMarketer. Verna says social game publishers take in most of their revenue from the sale of virtual goods. Gamers spend real money on virtual crops, fish food, you name it. And between last year and 2012, he adds, in-game ad revenue will more than double.
VERNA: The types of companies that have advertised in social games run the gamut from fast-food and premium package food, soft drinks, pet food, apparel, packaged goods, retail, financial services...
MERAJI: Alex Rampell, the CEO of TrialPay, says that list goes on and on because the social game world is so diverse. TrialPay matches advertisers with social game companies. There's CityVille, FarmVille, Texas HoldEm Poker, Pet Society, Mafia Wars, Car Town. Rampell says basically anything you want to advertise will work with the theme of a social game that's out there.
ALEX RAMPELL: Most people can't stand advertising, they want to skip it. Social gaming, by providing more crops or more fish or more virtual poker chips for the poker game, it actually encourages people to interact with advertisers, and they do take notice.
MARC ZEITLIN: So I'm just going to show you what FarmVille looks like, by clicking on this button and we'll be transported magically to my farm.
MERAJI: I'm in Marc Zeitlin's office at the Farmers Insurance headquarters in Los Angeles. Farmers is the number three home and auto insurance company in the U.S. It's been around since 1928.
ZEITLIN: All right, well, we've got what I would call a kick-ass farm. I've got a couple of fields full of crops right now.
MERAJI: Zeitlin is the Vice President of eBusiness, a department that's about two years old. He never played FarmVille before deciding it could be a great marketing tool for a very unhip insurance company. Now he's addicted.
ZEITLIN: And it's very hard on a marriage and other relationships, but I was very happy to begin playing it, because of the excitement around putting the Farmer's airship into the game.
MERAJI: On the upper left of Zeitlin's computer screen is a cartoon version of a Zeppelin airship with the Farmer's Insurance logo on it. He negotiated a deal with Zynga, the company that created FarmVille, to make the virtual airship available in the game - free - for 10 days. And if you downloaded the Farmer's airship, you got a brief respite from virtual farming.
ZEITLIN: So we had one story from a grandmother, which I'm not quite sure if it's a happy or a sad story, but she felt really relieved that she had the airship protecting her crops from withering because she was able to spend more time with her grandchildren.
MERAJI: Zeitlin says over five million users, like that grandma, downloaded the airship. And in that time, the Farmer's Insurance Facebook fan page went from a handful of fans to over 120,000. Real corporate money well spent in the virtual business world.
Shereen Meraji, NPR News.
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