Playful persuasion Advergames as gamified advertising

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. A popular application of gamification in advertising is the advergame. Advergames are fully gamified commercial messages, which means that they are advertising messages disguised as 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 these effects are identified. The empirical chapters report on four studies: an observational study (chapter 2), two experimental studies (chapters 4 & 5), and a meta-analysis (chapter 3).
Overall, the works included in this dissertation show that the gamification of advertising stimulates consumers’ affective processing of the persuasive message—resulting for example in positive affective brand responses. At the same time, the studies also show that gamification hinders consumers’ cognitive processing of the persuasive message—by limiting the encoding and storage of the embedded brand information. This means that, while being able to drive affective (and subsequently behavioral) brand responses, gamifying advertising makes it more difficult for consumers to recognize it as such. This is problematic, because being able to recognize a message as (potentially) persuasive is essential for someone to initiate a coping response—and ultimately to guarantee fair communication.