Zynga Goes Advertising Crazy at 7-Eleven Stores

If you’re not familiar with Zynga, you’re probably familiar with their properties such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and YoVille. If not, you’ve either been living under a rock without Internet access or you don’t use any social networks. While I’m proud to say I’m not one of the supposed 10% of the U.S. population playing FarmVille, there was a time where my friends and I played Zynga’s Texas Hold’em app on Facebook on a regular basis about 18-24 months back. They really have placed themselves extremely well in this new era of social gaming, with games that “speak to” basically every possible demographic. As a result, they have very quickly grown into a multi-billion dollar company in 3 short years by utilizing several monetization methods including incentivized offers that resulted in gaining virtual currency for their games… Zynga utilized these lead generation “scams” (<---an interesting read) as they're called on Wikipedia up until November 2009, and have also enabled users to purchase in-game money using a credit card or prepaid game card purchased from a retail store.

Anyway, Zynga recently decided to use some of their billions to launch a pretty intense advertising campaign at 7-Eleven stores. While not quite as over-the-top as when Fox promoted The Simpsons Movie by having 7-Eleven actually transform a handful of their stores to Qwik-E-Marts from the show, my local 7-Eleven stores have been turned completely upside down by Zynga products/posters/banners all over the store. It’s absolutely ridiculous. To capture this, I went on an iPhone photo-snapping spree so you could get an exact idea of how extensive this store transformation (read: advertising takeover) really is. Zynga went all-out so as to basically refuse being ignored by any type of customer that enters a 7-Eleven. They put as much in place as possible to try to disrupt or distract customers from the average “browsing experience.”

It’s very weird to see this type of extensive advertising for online social gaming in a real world setting, but when you’re as successful as Zynga, why not? They’ve got games that people love and they know it. One of the coolest parts of this campaign is that most, or at least several, of the products have a code to input into their games in exchange for virtual goods (I know that at the very least the water bottle caps and the bottom of the Slurpee cups have such codes). For their dedicated fan bases and newcomers alike, that is an awesome call to action. It either takes advantage of the addicted or formerly-addicted users by drawing them back to their computer and into the game world or can be enough motivation for a newbie to get started because they’re lead to believe that having such a code for an exclusive virtual item is giving them an upper hand most beginners don’t get to have. Zynga’s success is definitely worth studying and taking a closer look at. I know I’ll be keeping an eye on them in the next few years as social networking continues to grow.