• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 1, 2011

To connect more than 60 million women and teens ages 13 to 49 with advertisers, WeeWorld is launching the Social Games Advertising Network. SGA will rep games developed by independent developers on Facebook and other social game networks.

The SGA Network gives advertisers such as Warner Bros. the ability to reach 20 million more women than comScore's top five family and parenting Web sites combined -- including Disney Online, Cafe Mom Network, Glam Family, Family Education Network and Nick Family & Parents, according to the company. "These women and teens spend, on average, anywhere from 25 minutes to an hour online playing games," says Pauline Malcolm-John, executive vice president of sales at WeeWorld and SGA Network. "The brands never come across as in-your-face ads."

Users get free access to the game. Typically, they would need to pay for assets, like outfits and game play, through tokens or Facebook credits.

Malcolm-John says the ads or free assets are more like product placement in television shows, rather than traditional ad units online. Often, product placement is difficult to scale with volume. Not so in WeeWorld, she says, because it's about avatars collaborating with friends to share products, or expressing individuality. In fact, Warner Bros. became the first to sign on to the SGA Network to promote the studio's March 11 theatrical release of Red Riding Hood .

WeeWorld virtually recreated the outfits such as the red cape, along with other props from the "Red Riding Hood" movie, to put users in the middle of the forest and bring the movie to life. WeeWorld will also measure the viral impressions. If any player adopts the Red Riding Hood outfit and applies it to their avatar, it can track adoption to quantify buzz and impressions across a variety of channels such as Facebook.

Social networks account for 22.7% of all online activity, according to Nielsen.

The core piece of the ad campaign makes the user the "brand ambassador," but WeeWorld also offers the ability to track the free content to measure the influence, Malcolm-John explains. While the campaign starts out as earned media for the brand, where it plays a flat fee for the custom experience, it also capitalizes on the viral influence when users share the goods. "We did a campaign for shaving gel by creating a variety of free elements," she says. "It drove close to 300 million viral impressions that were all free to the marketer."