Zynga sneaks brands into Draw Something game

In fewer than five months Draw Something attracted 50 million downloads. Unfortunately for Zynga, who paid $200 million for the makers OMGPOP, the hottest mobile game in the world peaked at the time of their purchase and, since then, has been losing daily active users at a rate of knots.

To pull their investment back from the brink, Zynga are introducing a nifty way of inserting advertising into Draw Something. Instead of banner ads a more subtle way to advertise has been devised - brand names will be among the words offered to users to draw.

As others have already noted, brands such as KFC and Nike are already featured in the game. In fact, Zynga already knows that Draw Something users are happy to draw brands thanks to this little experiment.

"People loved to draw the Colonel and bags of Doritos," said Zynga's VP-mobile and general manager for its New York office.

One of the first to get involved is the National Hockey League. They are buying words associated with the game, such as "Zamboni" and "slap shot", according to Ad Age. As an added extra the NHL are posting some of the drawings on their Pinterest page #DrawNHL.

Tags: brand marketing, mobile ads, mobile games, mobile marketing, social gaming