Do you keep getting facebook status reports about friends buying a cow in FarmVille? You may pity these folks, but they belong to a group of some 20 million people that enters this virtual agri-realm daily.
So now, the marketers at Cascadian Farms will be educating those 20 million people about the benefits of organics in the real world, following in the footsteps of fellow General Mills brand Green Giant.
In May, Green Giant Fresh placed coded stickers on fresh veggies sold at Target stores across the U.S., each sticker redeemable at TheGiant.com for free “farm cash” units (fake money that players use in FarmVille that often costs real money). Five weeks and $100k worth of farm cash units later, they realized they were driving actual sales with virtual reality.
Cascadian Farms is playing a different angle by offering all players–for one week this July– a crop that can be harvested faster and bring a bigger cash return than other crops. That must be organics!
Vish Makhijani, senior vice president for business operations at Zynga (the company that created FarmVille as well as Mafia Wars and FrontierVille), said that this is FarmVille’s “first branded, in-game crop integration, and we chose Cascadian Farm to offer our users something that would benefit them online and offline.”
As social media brands like Zynga learn how to monetize the popularity of their properties, it is nice to see a net-positive brand leading the pack of advertisers. I guess organic farmers are innovative in both realities.
Tags: organics, social marketing