DreamWorks Teams With Zynga to Push 'Madagascar 3'

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Zynga has partnered for the third time with DreamWorks Animation, integrating the studio' s campaign for the upcoming movie "Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted" into the social gaming firm's popular Draw Something title. Running through May 31, the campaign on Zynga incorporates video trailers, banner ads, and user-generated content. The UGC feature will entail drawings inspired by prompts related to the movie that players can share socially.

"DreamWorks will choose certain terms or words that express their movie," Zynga CMO Jeff Karp told ClickZ on Friday. He then explained that players will draw something based on those words (main characters from the movie are an obvious prompt). In addition to sharing the results with their fellow players, players can send them out via Twitter with the hashtag #madwigout. For DreamWorks, he said, those features offer "the ability to leverage what [the studio calls] 'extensive engagement'... let the players express themselves through the content and share across social media."

At this point, Karp said, the studio has some idea of what works in Zynga's games. With this campaign, he said, players will see both trailers and interstitial videos related to the movie. But DreamWorks' marketing team, Karp said, was particularly interested in how Draw Something could help spread the word about the movie through UGC.

"We looked at a multitude of games," he said. Karp said DreamWorks CMO Anne Globe especially liked Draw Something, noting both the kind of interactivity players have with the game and its huge popularity right now. "Her friends and her daughter were playing it," he said. Globe, in a prepared statement, called Draw Something "the largest place where we can have this kind of interaction."

Karp added that Draw Something offers marketers "a big age range and potential."

Zynga's past brand integrations for DreamWorks have included the movie "Megamind" into FarmVille during 2010, and "Kung Fu Panda 2" into CityVille last year. Karp said Dreamworks' first in-game campaign engaged 15 million players, and it's second attempt for "Kung Fu Panda" reached 45 million players.