Zynga Partners With Paramount For Rango FrontierVille Promotion

Social game developer Zynga is partnering with Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies to promote the upcoming film Rango through a special branded mission in FrontierVille. In the mission, players search for the titular Rango character, who tells the player that he or she needs to save their town from a drought just as in the plot of the film. Players then must collect ten water buckets by sending requests to friends. Players who complete the mission can watch a video trailer for Rango and get a limited edition Rango statue that they can display in their Frontierville towns. The mission will be available through March 6.

FrontierVille currently serves 19.4 million monthly active users and 5.2 million daily active users, according to AppData. This is Zynga’s second promotional deal with Paramount, following its FarmVille promotion for the DreamWorks animated film MegaMind last year.  This one-day promotion engaged 9 million users and saw 4 million messages about the branded content sent from FarmVille gamers to their friends. Zynga has also previously partnered with Universal Pictures to promote the DVD release of the film Public Enemies in Mafia Wars, a promotion that engaged over 19 million users.

Zynga says that branded promotions like the Rango mission typically take a month to build and implement. Rango will also be the star of an upcoming branded virtual world developed by Funtactix that the company plans to launch alongside the film on March 4. Earlier this month, Zynga partnered with T-Mobile for a similar branded mission promotion in its Treasure Isle social game. As a developer Zynga is currently enjoying enormous success, recently negotiating a $500 million round of funding at a valuation of over $10 billion.

[via Inside Social Games]

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