Branded games -- games concocted entirely around a brand -- are another flash-in-the-pan phenomenon, according to the social game panel. Ubisoft's Krause and Zynga's Goldberg both said the development costs for a high-quality, engaging game are simply too high to make it worthwhile for brands to create their own online gaming experiences.

Asked for his predictions about social gaming in the next 12 months, Lee Blickstein said the coming year will be “about distribution, getting outside the walled garden of Facebook.� Blickstein said game publishers are moving to reach users by multiple channels, adding that this will be an important step in scaling up social game advertising.

Obviously any kind of product integration depends on contextual appropriateness, and the panelists at the social game discussion had some examples of “do’s� and “don’ts.� Adam Krause, senior manager of online advertising for Ubisoft Entertainment, recalled a promotion for Assassin’s Creed where game players could employ one of the killers in another virtual world. On the other hand Krause cautioned that “you wouldn’t, say, try to put Craftsman Tools in the World of Warcraft.�

Because advertising is still an add-on for social gaming, advertising needs to be standardized to make it easier for publishers, since their primary concern is game play and gamer experience. The concern isn’t just the appearance of the advertising, and how the game player interacts with it, but also how it fits with the back-end logistics, according to Zynga’s Robert Goldberg: “If the advertising impacts either our players or our production cycles, we won’t do it. So we need standardization to make this work.�

I didn't realize so many people have concluded in-game advertising, at least as originally conceived, is dead. But that seemed to be the consensus at the OMMA Global panel on social game  advertising. Moderator Mark Friedler, the publisher of Industry Gamers, got a laugh when he asked the audience: “Does anyone remember in-game advertising? Right, nobody wants to.�  Friedler said planning and executing in-game advertising was far-too labor intensive and complex, in short, a “trainwreck.� Glad I missed it.

Currently online casual gaming is still experimenting with ad models, in part because it's core business has been located elsewhere -- and that's a virtue, according to Zynga's Robert Goldberg: "The good thing is that this is a medium that is not ad-supported, it’s virtual goods-supported -- and that's actually good, because it means we can take our time and do this the right way." That said, Goldberg said Zynga has delivered some big successes for advertisers, including for Microsoft, where they "drove 400,000 conversions to their fanpage on Facebook in 16 hours," and Universal Pictures' Public Enemies, where "16 million gifts …

Robert Goldberg, senior vice-president of Zynga, said that 66% of players for online casual games are above 25, while Mihir Shah, chief revenue officer for Offerpal Media, said the single biggest growth segment for their casual online gaming unit is 35-44-year-old women. Everyone agreed that this demographic segment is a “very desirable audience.�