Would You Trade Credit Card Rewards for Virtual Goods? American Express and Zynga Have Some Pixels for You

Farmville makes people do crazy things, but this is perhaps the craziest that we’ve heard of (so far).

American Express has teamed up with FarmVille game developer Zynga to offer Amex users exclusive virtual rewards. Key word, virtual. Yes, a credit card company has finally figured out a way to offer rewards that don’t actually cost them anything.

If you don’t ever travel, or are just tired of trying to accumulate 500,000 points for a room upgrade, or some other elusive reward this could be an… interesting promotion.

Zynga’s revenue is estimated to be somewhere between $300 and $600 million per year, and the last company we covered with those type of earnings estimates is being eyed by Google at a price tag close to $6 billion. So we don’t question that people are undoubtedly spending real money on imaginary farm equipment and other pixel-perfect items, but do you really want to trade your hard earned reward points in for them?

If you’re still nodding yes – well, we’ll be working on some virtual items for you ASAP, but in the meantime you can trade in your Amex points for exclusive items like a 540-point purple cow or 1300-point blue maor in FarmVille, a 1945-point Amex Lightning Stove in Cafe World and a 755-point Roadster in Yoville.

We guess it had to happen at some point, but let’s just hope airlines don’t get any ideas. Can you imagine how much more random the SkyMall will become if this catches on?