If you’ve been keeping up to speed on The Awesome Blog, you’re well aware that casual games are a compelling avenue for targeting women. If your brand has come around on the idea and is ready to take the plunge, they’ll obviously want to know which casual gaming is the right match for them.
This article from CNN would be a good place to start. It’s a profile of Zynga, the company behind status-update-hijacking games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. The interactive chart at the top of the page shows the demographic breakdown for their top 5 titles, as well as the average dayparts and time committments. Supporting our Mother’s Little Helper thesis, FarmVille, Café World, Fishville are all dominated by women, although Mafia Wars unsurprisingly skews more towards dudes.
The article also examines the secrets to Zynga’s success. Like all casual games, these Facebook-based games are extremely simple, and can be played in small spurts. But, these titles really took off because many of the tasks required teamwork from other people in your network (such as coming together to raise a barn in Farmville). This built-in social element adds an entertaining layer to the games, but also ensures that the games (or, at least their updates) spread like wildfire through Facebook. (Even if you don’t play these games, you inevitably know a lot about them just from scanning your Facebook news feed.) Of course, not everyone’s so impressed with their success.
While the advertising opportunities in these games still appear to be relatively traditional, an enterprising marketer might be able to tap these social elements to make their ads really stand out. Is there an opportunity for Groupon-like ads in these games, where players band together to get deals in the same way they band together to create virtual mafias? We’d bet the farm on it.
