The game, which is a take on Scrabble, has been working its way into the cultural fabric, as Zynga is happy to remind us with a lighthearted list of milestone moments, including Alec Baldwin’s meltdown that led to getting booted off a plane (see the entire list below).

But yesterday, it became part of one of America’s biggest pastimes: Football.

If you were watching the Super Bowl, you may have briefly seen Words With Friends creators and brothers Paul and David Bettner in a cameo performance during Best Buy’s commercial. The funniest part is that they get busted for playing on a plane.

In addition to Zynga, the commercial also noted other mobile innovations, including inventors from Shazam, Square and Instagram.

Words with Friends was acquired by Zynga through the purchase of Newtoy and is actually part of an entire franchise of games that includes Chess With Friends, Hanging With Friends and the latest addition, Scramble With Friends.

In Apple’s App Store for iPhone, Words With Friends has regularly been the leading game in the word category since 2010, until Hanging With Friends became the leading game in June 2011. In August 2011, Zynga released Words With Friends on Facebook, where it has continued to be one of Zynga’s top 10 most popular titles. Currently, it ranks sixth, with Hanging With Friends now placing at 10th.

In fact, the Words With Friends franchise as a whole likely represents the company’s most played titles, even if it doesn’t monetize as well as other social game titles, like FarmVille, Poker or CityVille. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

In recognition of Words With Friends and its appearance in the commercial, here’s Zynga’s list of the game’s biggest cultural moments:

1. In the words of Jamie Lee Curtis, waiting for a word is “like a young lover waiting for words from her beau.”
2. It’s credited for being a matchmaker and a flirt because strangers can play each other and chat.
3. It helped save lives (See Gizmodo story here.)
4. Celebrity couples do it every day (Alec Baldwin is the best example.)
5. It’s the subject of ‘rapper braggadocio’ — word up, Fabolous and Big Boi.
6. John Mayer tweeted, “Words With Friends is the new Twitter.”
7. Finally, people no longer have to think you’re talking about wrestling or pandas when you type WWF.
8. The New York Giants are fans. (See the WSJ story.)
9. It became an official FAA violation when one smart celeb got kicked off a flight. (See above.)
10. And finally, the game co-starred in a Superbowl XLVI commercial.

And here, if you missed it, is the commercial:

Here, Hulu returns to the campaign it launched in 2009, which starred Alec Baldwin and involved an alien plan to turn human brains into tasty “mushymush.” You see, your mother was right about TV turning your brains to mush, and Hulu is just the secret weapon to make it happen faster, allowing the aliens to eat more. Get it? And Hulu Plus, its subscription service, is even better.

Naturally Hulu is turning to Twitter, and there’s a hashtag you can use to tweet about what you’re watching to turn your own brain into #mushymush.

The latest installment stars Will Arnett, whom you’ll recognize if you watch shows like “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development” and “Up All Night,” which I don’t, so I, uh, didn’t. Anyhow, enjoy the ad:

Correction: Earlier I said this was the ad, not understanding that the video above is actually a teaser for the real ad that will run on Sunday. Sorry about that.

Except that it wasn’t much of an apology at all.

Instead, Baldwin played the role of an American Airlines captain who apologized to him.

During a Weekend Update skit with Seth Meyers, the mustached captain called Baldwin an “American treasure,” explaining that the actor was justified for refusing to stop playing Words With Friends on his phone.

“What harm was he causing to play his game?” the “captain” asked. “And not just any game, but a word game for smart people?”

Ultimately, it wasn’t the Scrabble-like game that got Baldwin booted. He also slammed a bathroom door. According to the very forgiving captain, “Words With Friends can be frustrating.”

The original saga, which played out very publicly via Baldwin’s Twitter account, provided a high-profile boost to Zynga, the game maker behind Words With Friends, which is getting ready to stage the largest Internet IPO since Google.

Here’s Baldwin’s — a.k.a. the captain’s — account of how it all went down:

The San Francisco social games company is looking to raise as much as $1.15 billion, which would make it the largest IPO from a U.S. Internet company since Google raised $1.7 billion in 2004.

Shares will likely be sold on Thursday, with the company trading under the ticker ZNGA for the first time on Friday. In the meantime, the company is trying to jockey for the best price and the most shares sold.

At a luncheon yesterday with potential investors, CEO Mark Pincus made one of his boldest predictions yet when it comes to how well its games will monetize.

Currently, Zynga has about 227 million monthly active users who play games for free on Facebook, such as FarmVille, CityVille, Zynga Poker and Mafia Wars. But only a small fraction — around 3 percent — pay for additional features, such as decorative items for a farm or new clothes for an avatar.

“We could see that doubling,” said Pincus, according to Reuters.

Doubling? That’s sure to whet investors’ appetites.

But it’s hard to know how the company will accomplish that.

To be sure, Zynga is about to enter one of its biggest growth periods yet and anticipates launching several new games over the next few months.

On one level, more games will likely translate to more players. But will it translate to more players willing to pay?

That seems like a leap of faith.

However, based on documents filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, we have gleaned that some of Zynga’s growth prospects are guaranteed thanks to the company’s close – albeit complicated – relationship with Facebook.

As one of the conditions of its partnerships, Facebook is obligated to help Zynga meet certain growth targets. In return, Zynga has committed to offering Facebook a number of exclusive game titles.

The specific details of the relationship were redacted in the document, so it’s not clear how aggressive those growth targets are over the five-year life of the contract.

Zynga also has close ties with Google, which has recently launched its own games network. Zynga has already launched several titles there, including CityVille. Following the offering, Google will own 3.8 percent of the company.

Also during yesterday’s lunch, Zynga’s executives were grilled about player retention and churn rates and its growth prospects for mobile.

Among several responses, Pincus joked about how Alec Baldwin was recently kicked off a flight after getting caught playing Words With Friends while still at the gate.

It seemed investors were not as interested in hearing about recent negative reports that Pincus’s hard-charging personality has made it an unfavorable working environment or that some employees were asked to give up their stock options.

Plus, it’s a crowd that Pincus should be comfortable speaking in front of. This will be the second company the Wharton and Harvard Business School grad has taken public.

The company will continue to have meetings today and into next week. So far, reports indicate that the conversations are going well.

Zynga has apparently already received enough orders to cover all the shares being sold in its initial public offering, reports BusinessWeek, which talked to two people with knowledge of the situation. Zynga plans to sell 100 million shares for $8.50 to $10 apiece, which would value the company at as much as $7 billion.

Zynga, which is currently preparing to raise $1 billion in an IPO next week, acquired the popular mobile game about a year ago.

And while the social games company may have to keep mostly mute as part of its quiet period, Baldwin kept his fingers busy, updating the Twitterverse about the showdown between actor and flight attendant.

Flight attendant on American reamed me out 4 playing WORDS W FRIENDS while we sat at the gate, not moving.#nowonderamericaairisbankrupt

December 6, 2011 2:01 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@AlecBaldwin

Alec Baldwin

Baldwin, who said he was rebooked on a later flight after getting booted, garnered a lot of sympathy. American Airlines quickly tried to extinguish the flames by reaching out to him directly.

@AlecBaldwin Mr. Baldwin, we are looking into this. Please DM us contact information.

December 6, 2011 2:33 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@AmericanAir

American Airlines

Zynga couldn’t turn down the free publicity, tweeting its words of encouragement and mocking up a quick photo of a game board declaring to “let Alec play.”

Hey @AmericanAir, don’t ground @AlecBaldwin for playing. A.B.S.U.R.D. is worth *at least* 11 points in @WordsWFriends #LetAlecPlay

December 6, 2011 3:11 pm via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@zynga

Zynga

Still Baldwin’s jibes continued to flow:

My words with friends user name is now #theresalwaysunited

December 6, 2011 3:32 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@AlecBaldwin

Alec Baldwin

TMZ was on the scene, but Baldwin declined to comment on the circumstances, including why exactly he was kicked off the plane.

Here is a very funny ad for a baseball cap company with actors Alec Baldwin (he of the New York Yankees persuasion) and John Krasinski (a Boston Red Sox fanatic), getting us ready for the 2011 season.

By the way, Walt Mossberg loves the Sox, although BoomTown loves me some World Series-winning San Francisco Giants.

The beard is still very feared.

Enjoy:

Who’s interested in that? Plenty of people, according to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. He says the service, which formally left its beta phase a couple of weeks ago, has “exceeded expectations” and has already hit its year-end subscriber goals.

Cool! So how many people is that? Kilar won’t say, of course–the joint venture between GE’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox is awfully selective about the data it releases. (Disclosure: News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

But Kilar is willing to talk broadly about the service, and the way subscribers are consuming it: While Hulu Plus lets you watch video on mobile devices like Apple’s iPhone and iPad (but not Google’s Android handsets) most viewing is happening on TV screens, he said.

And most of the time, the service is getting to the TV from the Web via Sony’s PlayStation 3 console, one of several devices Hulu is working with (not included, so far: Google TV and the Boxee Box). So that’s interesting.

But why pay for Hulu Plus at all? Why not simply connect your PC to your TV with an HDMI cable, and watch regular Hulu, for free?

You can! And Hulu’s efforts to persuade you not to do so illustrate a key problem for the service and the Web video business in general.

Because while consumers may not see any difference between the stuff they watch on the Web and the stuff they watch on TV, advertisers and programmers do. The first kind of video is much less valuable than the second.

That’s going to change over time, but for now, Hulu has to do its best to make sure that anyone who watches Hulu on a TV screen “pays twice”–by both watching ads and handing over a credit card.

Let’s let Kilar explain in his own words, via an interview I taped at Hulu’s New York office yesterday. Note the storyboards for Hulu’s excellent Alec Baldwin-is-an-alien ad behind him.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/pay-for-web-tv-no-problem-hulu-plus-exceeding-expectations/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090617/another-twitter-business-that-doesnt-make-money-for-twitter-pay-per-twitterer/ http://allthingsd.com/20090617/another-twitter-business-that-doesnt-make-money-for-twitter-pay-per-twitterer/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:00:12 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8236

One day I’ll get to stop writing this, because Twitter is slowly starting to sketch out some revenue plans.

But for now, it still holds true: Almost all of the money Twitter is generating is being generated by companies other than Twitter. They’re members of the growing ecosystem of companies that base their business on the microblogging service, but don’t pay Twitter a dime.

Here’s another one: Pontiflex, a lead-generation start-up that hoovers up names and other info from users who visit its network of publishers and then sells the data to marketers. The Brooklyn-based company is rolling out a Twitter product that lets marketers compile a list of interested Twitter users.

Sound simple? It is. All Pontiflex is doing is adding a Twitter “handle” field to its lead-generation forms (see example at right). Armed with these data, a marketer can follow Twitterers who say they’re interested in their products, and…not much else.

Since the users aren’t actually signing up to “follow” any of the marketers, said marketers can’t send them direct messages. The marketers could try to “at reply” their leads–the equivalent of shouting out the name of someone you think might be at a loud cocktail party but can’t actually see. But that’s about it.

So what’s that information worth? Depends, says Pontiflex CEO Zephrin Lasker. Probably more than an email address, but less than a phone number. He says pricing will depend on clients, volume, etc., but he figures he’ll be able to sell each Twitter handle to his consumer packaged goods clients for a couple bucks a pop. Call it anywhere from 50 cents to $5 per name.

Per usual, Twitter won’t see a penny of that.

Like most other Twitter ecosystem ideas, this one only works if Twitter really crosses over from novelty to mainstream and stays there. And the jury’s still out on that.

But in the meantime, marketers want in on the new hotness, and Lasker is happy to oblige.

“This is one of those things that people don’t know how to participate in, but they want to be there,” he says. “So, that’s where we can help.”

Also, just because we’re talking about leads, and I use any excuse I can get, here’s Alec Baldwin’s awesome “Always Be Closing” speech from “Glengarry Glen Ross.” (Warning! Contains salty sales language.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090617/another-twitter-business-that-doesnt-make-money-for-twitter-pay-per-twitterer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090202/hulus-super-bowl-pump-fake-not-coming-to-an-ipod-near-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20090202/hulus-super-bowl-pump-fake-not-coming-to-an-ipod-near-you/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:43:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=3769 Is Hulu coming to your iPhone? Or your iPod?

Maybe one day. But not anytime soon.

You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, though, if you saw Hulu’s first-ever TV commercial, which aired during last night’s Super Bowl.

The spot features Alec Baldwin doing a Jack Donaghy-meets-”Men In Black” bit, and it’s quite good. But several literal-minded blognerds, like me, got caught up on one line–the one where Baldwin says Hulu lets you watch movies and TV shows on “portable computing devices.”

Because in blognerd world, that could mean Hulu intends to move the service beyond its current incarnation–which lets you stream clips for free to your PC–to something you could take with you–like Apple’s (AAPL) iPods or iPhones. Wouldn’t that be great?

You betcha. But it’s not happening in the near future.

Hulu, a joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC, declined to comment on the ad. And I probably could have figured out that this was, you know, not that serious, since the tagline of the ad is “Hulu: an evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy.”

But I was feeling pretty literal today. So I asked someone who ought to know and was told that the JV is concentrating on the core streaming service for some time to come.

What if Hulu did want to make its video truly portable? It would take some doing.

If the company wanted to get its stuff on the iPhone, it would either need to start transmitting its files using something other than Flash format, because Apple’s phones won’t play Flash files. Or it would require Flash maker Adobe (ADBE) and Apple to get Flash to work on the handsets, something that is often talked about but has yet to materialize.

Hulu on your iPod, served up as a downloadable file, is no technical challenge, obviously. Apple is already selling movies and TV shows via its iTunes store.

But serving up free, ad-supported downloadable video is another matter: NBC has played with this idea a little bit, via its NBC Direct. But it needs a lot of work before either advertisers or users are going to find it acceptable.

So: Fun to think about, unlikely to materialize. But more plausible than that tentacle that pops out of Baldwin’s suit at the end of the spot.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090202/hulus-super-bowl-pump-fake-not-coming-to-an-ipod-near-you/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081019/sarah-palin-plays-sarah-palin-on-snl-nails-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20081019/sarah-palin-plays-sarah-palin-on-snl-nails-it/#comments Sun, 19 Oct 2008 07:37:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5304

Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin did a very smooth--if a tiny bit sweetly awkward--job in her appearance on "Saturday Night Live" last night.

It was a good decision to go low-key and also do a bit of stunt casting by bringing in Mark Wahlberg, who was mocked in an impersonation last week by SNL, and also Alec Baldwin.

The well-known liberal actor did a nice turn pretending to insult Palin, while thinking she was his "30 Rock" co-star Tina Fey, whose many turns at impersonating Palin have become a huge Internet hit.

Palin came on again later in the NBC television comedy show on its "Weekend Update," rocking out to a perfect rap by a very pregnant Amy Poehler.

These two from SNL will surely be the biggest Web video hits this week.

And, goodness gracious, do Palin and Fey really look alike, passing by each other at the end of the opening skit without speaking.

Sometimes politics can be really ugly and sometimes silly--and this time Palin managed to poke fun at herself without being either.

You betcha' she did.

Here's the two videos from last night and also the other three that already aired on SNL:

Opening:

Weekend Update Palin Rap:

VP Debate:

Interview with NBC's Katie Couric:

With Sen. Hillary Clinton:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081019/sarah-palin-plays-sarah-palin-on-snl-nails-it/feed/ 3