"All My Gaming" Tops Daytime Television For Women

It used to be that soaps and daytime television programming were an ideal way for Rainmakers to reach female consumers, but with more women joining the workforce, that traditional approach became less effective. Today, daytime television is under further attack with the advent of social online gaming. That's right, the majority of 15 million Farmville (Zynga) online gamers in the United States are women 18-50 years old. According to a research firm named Flurry, the social gaming audience on mobile devices now rival that of individual top-rated TV shows, leading many analysts to believe that these social network games are playing a significant role in the 50 percent drop in advertising media buys around soaps and other daytime programming since 2005.
 Researchers point out that in addition to drawing TV-comparable audiences, the reach of social gaming apps aren't limited by a conventional programming schedule. Apps are an always-on medium every day, 365 days a year, giving advertisers an opportunity to reach a larger consumer audience than TV, because of the 15 times greater frequency. Rainmakers take note, Apple has already pulled in $60 million in initial advertisers' commitments for iAd platform, making the company almost overnight a leader in mobile advertising. That, of course, is only a peek into the frontier, as brands spend more than $70 billion on television advertising today.