Zynga’s Continued Offline Endeavors and the Future of Google

Notice: This is a fun, speculative post that started as one thing and trails off into another. It has been designed to cause user discussion and has allowed me (Jacob, Jonathan Volk’s employee) a large platform to post my semi-ridiculous predictions. Yes, I’m a geek.

Ten days after my last post on Zynga’s offline advertising in 7-Eleven stores went live I was picking up a friend from SFO (airport) and on the way back, this billboard caught my eye:

Being that Zynga is San Francisco based, this was no real surprise, but it was still cool to see.

A week ago Mashable posted that FarmVille cash is available on Green Giant produce products in grocery stores and then earlier this month it was revealed that Google secretly invested $100 million+ in Zynga in preparation for the new upcoming sector of their site, Google Games. There’s no stopping Zynga.

A lot of people accredit (some of) Facebook’s success, or at least part of its initial driving force, to their application platform, and the most successful applications/games are definitely Zynga’s (what other Facebook-application-focused companies have had such extensive, if any, offline advertising campaigns as their 7-Eleven and Green Giant campaigns?). I think it’s obvious to say Zynga wouldn’t be as successful without Facebook and they “rode on their coattails,” but would it also be fair to say Facebook wouldn’t be as successful without Zynga’s games?

I think SkyNet Google agrees with me. I think their investment in Zynga for Google Games is laying the groundwork for their rumored Google Me social network. I think they’ll try to launch it in the midst of the bad press Facebook will be getting this November when the Facebook movie, The Social Network, is released.

What do you think?

[Image credits: Tomatoes, SkyNet]