Mobile marketing within games

This works both ways: generating money for the creator and delivering targeted ads to interested parties. The best mobile marketing-enabled games are below:

Angry Birds

The "best" game on the market comes with a slew of banner ads. Pause the game and ads for Angry Birds merchandise pop up. During game play, interstitial ads display a range of targeted ads based on whoever is paying the most to Angry Birds creator Rovio that month. This formula has become the basis for most ads which chose to incorporate mobile marketing. Other games are far more intrusive with their ads. Angry Birds remains the best, in these terms.

Words with Friends

This fantastic little title is an advertiser's dream. Friends play against each other in a game of Scrabble, one turn at a time, from anywhere in the world. The action is slow-paced, but becomes heated when the board fills up! Adverts practically flow out of the game, with full-screen adverts blocking the user after every turn. While it may be intrusive, it sure beats paying US$0.99 to remove the ads. After a while, they simply become tolerable. Interstitial ads also pop up during gameplay.

Fruit Ninja

Slice and dice the fruits for fun, or challenge others online. Fruit Ninja is a deserved winner of top game of the year from multiple websites and its ad support is fairly unobtrusive. As with most of the games, purchasing the full version of Fruit Ninja removes the banner ads, but then in-game mobile marketing would falter. The ads are also small enough to be unnoticeable, so game play remains smooth and uninterrupted.

Mafia Wars

This one's a doozy. As Mafia Wars requires a constant online connection, the user practically has the ads forced down their throat. Thankfully though, the gameplay is insanely addictive and users can even purchase an ad removal tool from within the game. It's a great crime sim title with plenty to do and see, so advertisers have leveraged the popularity of the game to include ads from all spectrums of the mobile marketing division.