Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Movies are the media of the last century; games are the media of the new millennium. (Executive, Electronics Arts)
As consumers spend more time online for shopping, entertainment and research; traditional online tactics, like banners, become less effective. As a result, marketers are looking for an interactive environment with the promise of higher engagement (Goh and Ping, 2014), which in return is expected to increase the effectiveness of advertising (Calder and Malthouse, 2012; Calder et al., 2009). This form of advertising in its broadest term is called “branded entertainment” (BE). The main idea behind BE is to attract the attention of the audience with the game and convey the promotional message while the player is having fun. Advergames are another form of BE. Advergames are “computer games specifically designed and created to promote a brand, product, service where the entertainment content mimics traditional game forms” (Kretchmer, 2004, p. 7; Terlutter and Capella, 2013, p. 96). With the promotional content, e.g., brand logo, along with interactive and fun environment, advergames are believed to create more favorable outcomes in brand positioning and promotion.
Branded entertainment and the use of advergames have drawn the attention of scholars as well. In recent years many researchers are trying to understand the conditions in which BE would be most effective. Some of these studies were designed to understand the possible effects of brand-game congruity in advergames (e.g., Okazaki and Yagüe, 2012; Goh and Ping, 2014; Vashisht and Pillai, 2016), while others were focused on the affective and cognitive responses of the players based on game-brand related factors (e.g., brand prominence, game content, thematic relevance) (Wise et al., 2008; Couberghe and De Pelsmacker, 2013; Waiguny et al., 2013; Vashisht and Pillai, 2016). Finally, there are a small number of studies considering the audience factor (Waiguny et al., 2012; Terlutter and Capella, 2013; Steffen et al., 2013).
The present study aims to close a research gap of the current studies by connecting advergame features with audience responses relying on dual-process theories of persuasion. The aim is to examine the possible effects of cognitive load (CL), along with game involvement (GI) on players' affective responses. The specific objectives of the research are:
- (1)
to discover whether multi-brand (MB) and single brand (SB) settings in advergames have different effects on players’ affective responses;
- (2)
to examine the possible effects of CL, for both MB and SB on affective responses of the game players;
- (3)
to explore whether GI of the player has any effect on affective responses created by CL and BE (SB vs. MB) and if so, in which way.