The week-long campaign will appear in Zynga’s popular FrontierVille, and is part of the company’s efforts to build up additional sources of revenue beyond relying on the few users who elect to pay for virtual goods.

“Rango,” which debuts in theaters on Friday, is about a chameleon who must save the day in a Western-themed town, much like the atmosphere depicted in FrontierVille.

The placement is being conducted through a partnership between the San Francisco-based social games developer Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies.

Starting this afternoon, the 15 million daily players of FrontierVille will be presented with three Rango-related tasks, if they choose to participate.

Players must find the chameleon, who easily blends into the frontier. Then, they must get their friends to send them 10 buckets of water, and finally they must watch the film’s trailer in advance of the film’s release. If players do all three, they receive a Rango statue to add to their homestead.

The product placement is more overt than some of the ones in the past. It also doesn’t offer much value. For instance, the statue has no secret powers, and will not bring crops back to life, like the Farmers Insurance blimp did last year in FarmVille.

In an interview, Manny Anekal, global director of brand advertising at Zynga, told us that’s not the appeal of the statue. “They are collection-ists and completion-ists, but they also like getting things that are unique, and you can’t buy it,” he said.

For Paramount, he said they’ll be watching the number of people who participate and how much awareness of the brand it creates.

Some critics question whether Zynga’s strategy of doing one-off product placements will be able to scale and be come a large enough business since each offer is so specialized, and the company must work so closely with the advertiser to come up with an appropriate ad campaign.

Anekal said it’s a work in progress. They’ve only had a dozen or so product placements since the second half of last year. “In terms of what we can scale. We are working towards that. We are nascent in the space.”

Zynga has worked to promote two other movies: Sony Pictures Entertainment’s The Green Hornet in Mafia Wars and DreamWorks Animations’ Megamind in FarmVille. The DreamWorks promotion attracted more than nine million people to interact with Megamind’s “Mega-Farm” in the 24-hour period.

“People wouldn’t like [ads on the homepage]. We prioritize the end user over the advertiser.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt, August 2009

How’s this for product placement? Google is promoting its new Nexus One “superphone” from the front pages of two of its most highly trafficked properties: Google.com and YouTube.

Surf over to the former and you’ll find a short plug for the Nexus One right beneath the query field on the company’s otherwise spartan search page. Point your browser at the latter and you’ll find a tile pitching an entire YouTube channel dedicated to the device, complete with demos and, of course, a direct link to the Google-hosted Web store through which it can be purchased (see below; click on image to enlarge).

Together, these sites reach hundreds of millions of visitors a month, so this is not an insubstantial promotion, and it’s sure to generate a fair bit of buzz for the Nexus One, which won’t be sold in stores.

This isn’t the first time Google (GOOG) has promoted a consumer electronics device from its homepage–the search giant featured Droid there last November and T-Mobile’s G1 in October 2008.

As I have noted here before, it’s interesting to see Google leveraging search–a product in which it enjoys a de facto monopoly–to promote a second product that isn’t yet dominant (Android).

Turned out, the video series was a fictional one put together by a coterie of filmmakers and backed by Creative Artists Agency. It wasn’t a front for a national advertising campaign, though.

At least not at the time. But by early the following year, Lonelygirl15 had begun shopping itself for product placements and managed to sell one to Hershey’s. And now the video series has gone a step further: It’s allowing Neutrogena to sponsor a new character. On Monday, a 22-year-old Neutrogena scientist will appear on the series to help its lead characters defeat an evil organization known as “the Order.” “This type of integration actually allows us to achieve even more reality for our show,” said Lonelygirl15 co-creator Greg Goodfried. “The most important thing is telling a compelling story. In this instance, the story line comes first and the fact that the new character works at Neutrogena heightens the reality.”

“Reality” here being stealth-marketing parlance for “our bottom line,” right Greg?