Adolescents and handheld advertising: The roles of brand familiarity and smartphone attachment in the processing of mobile advergames

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Chapter 4 Recognizing the Commercial Intent of Mobile Advergames
Adolescents and handheld advertising: The roles of brand familiarity and smartphone attachment in the processing of mobile advergames

English Summary
Historically, advertisers and marketers were early to recognize and harness the power of play. For years, they have been using game thinking and game mechanics to enhance advertising for the purpose of influencing consumer behavior. This process is more commonly referred to as gamification and one of the most popular applications of gamification in advertising is the advergame.
Advergames are fully gamified commercial messages. On an operational level, they are games developed by brands to promote a particular commercial message. In this dissertation the underlying mechanisms of advergame effects are investigated and several boundary conditions for advergame effects are identified that are specific to emerging advergame formats like mobile and VR advergames.

Five Main Conclusions
Four individual studies are included in this dissertation: An observational study, two experimental studies, and a metaanalysis. Five main conclusions are drawn:

(i) Intrinsic enjoyment experiences can be important drivers of consumer responses
In the context of branded apps, intrinsic enjoyment experiences were found predictive of positive app attitudes and increased app attention. Notably, only app attitude seems to predict subsequent brand attitude. Overall, these results highlight the important role of intrinsic enjoyment experiences for driving consumer responses and give an indication of why gamified advertising is effective.

(ii) Gamified advertising is in many ways more effective than non-gamified advertising
A meta-analysis of advergame effects indicates that gamified advertising generally outperforms non-gamified advertising in terms of the most important advertising outcomes (i.e., ad attitude, persuasion, choice behavior)with the exception of brand memory measures like recall and recognition. Advergames were found to be more persuasive (i.e., driving affective and conative response) and more effective in driving choice behavior than non-gamified advertising. Furthermore, as advertising messages, advergames are also evaluated more positively than non-gamified advertising. In sum, these results emphasize the strong utility of gamification for influencing people's attitudes and behaviors.

(iii) Consumers often fail to recognize the commercial nature of advergames
From the studies in this dissertation it also becomes clear that many people struggle with recognizing the commercial nature of advergames. The meta-analysis demonstrates that both children and adults are less likely to recognize advergames as advertising, when compared to non-gamified advertising messages. Notably, children struggle considerably more with this than adults. Interestingly however, the meta-analysis also reveals a negative association between consumers' general digital skills and their susceptibility to advergames. Which means that advergames have a smaller persuasive impact on consumers who have stronger general digital skills (when compared to weaker general digital skills).

(iv) When young consumers identify an advergame as advertising then this could increase its persuasiveness impact
In one of the studies, adolescents showed more positive brand attitudes after recognizing that advergames are advertising. Interestingly, this implies that when brands target young consumers, they might benefit from disclosing the commercial nature of the advergame.

(v) Technological affordances can enhance consumer experiences when playing advergames
A final conclusion that can be drawn from the dissertation is that new technological affordances can enhance people's overall consumer experiences with advergames. An example of such a new affordance that is investigated in this dissertation, is the embedding of virtual products in head-mounted display (HMD) VR advergames to allow consumers to interact with the product.

Main Implications
The studies in this dissertation offer valuable insights into the underlying mechanisms of advergaming. Overall, the results seem to suggest that the gamification of advertising stimulates the affective processing of the persuasive message, resulting for example in positive affective brand responses. At the same time, gamification also seems to hinder the cognitive processing of the persuasive message-limiting the encoding and storage of the embedded brand information. The results show that advergames can effectively be used to influence affective, conative, and behavioral outcomes, and that they often outperform non-gamified advertising. Notably, these commercial benefits, for advertisers, seem to come at a cost for the consumer-with the results indicating that many people lack the knowledge and skills to recognizing the commercial nature of advergames. This is problematic, because being able to recognize when being persuaded is essential for someone to initiate a coping response.
In the future, consumers are expected to require even more complex competences to remain able to distinguish commercial from non-commercial content. With the rise of HMD VR as experiential marketing platform for example, players will not only have to be able to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial content, but also between virtual and base reality, whenever they are exposed to a persuasive message. In light of these developments, it seems evident that continuous research into the workings and development of gamified advertising practices is necessary to assure that consumers will remain empowered in their digitalized societies-and remain able to make informed consumer decisions.