Excerpt: You know the type -- social game addicts who pepper your Facebook page with updates about the wine recipe they created playing "FarmVille," or the gem broker they robbed on "Mafia Wars." To fuel their gaming, those same people may soon be posting updates about the sneaker they designed for Adidas, or the app they downloaded for Coke.
With Americans now spending a third of their online time logged into social networks or playing games, advertisers are trying to harness that enthusiasm to get people to engage with their brands. No one expects game-based social advertising to supplant Google's huge AdWords search business or Yahoo's lead in banner display ads, but the model is another example of how the explosive growth of social networking and gaming offers new opportunities for advertisers to target an online audience.
"We see it as an entirely new kind of advertising product," said Arik Czerniak, chief operating officer of SupersonicAds, a company that allows people to earn the virtual currency needed to play games on social networks like Facebook or hi5 by watching video ads or responding to targeted offers.
For example, players who need "city bucks" to keep playing Playdom's "Social City" game on Facebook can earn one city buck by watching a 4 minute, 23 second Butterfinger ad starring aging TV stars Adam West and Erik Estrada, or pull in 113 city bucks if they sign up for a new Netflix account.
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