Dive Brief:

• Game maker Zynga is looking to crack the mobile gaming code in a post-Farmville world.
• Facebook, Zynga’s past main market, is at 1.39 billion active monthly mobile users out of 1.55 billion total with desktop use on a steep downward trend.
• In good news for the gaming company, its advertising revenue is up.

Dive Insight:

Remember playing (or getting a frenzy of updates from Facebook friends about) Farmville, CityVille or CafeWorld? Well now Zynga, the parent company, is having troubles tracking its desktop users to mobile. Facebook, a key channel for Zynga, has seen its mobile user base grow rapidly while Zynga’s user base overall is shrinking. Facebook is over one and half billion monthly users and almost 1.4 billion monthly mobile users, while Zynga is hanging on to 19 million, down 27% year-over-year.

The game developer hopes to turn this trend around with advertising and has created Studio E, an internal agency to boost this aspect of its business.

Julie Shumaker, VP global sales and Studio E, told Ad Exchanger, “We started our ads business in 2011. Before that, Zynga only had two mechanisms for brands to participate. The first was performance marketing through Facebook offers walls: 'Click here to get a discount on 1-800-Flowers'-type things. The second piece, which made up the lion’s share, was deep sponsored integrations in a classic product placement sense. American Express sponsoring farmers in FarmVille. For example, we used these products to test the waters of player enthusiasm, and from there, we went looking for mechanisms to help marketers buy more quantifiable, efficient media.”