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As game play continues to grow in popularity among consumers, advertisers are increasingly relying on video, computer, or online games as a platform to deliver branded entertainment. Advertisers use games in two different ways to place brands: in-game advertising and advergames (Lee & Youn, 2008). Ingame advertising refers to the placement of advertisers’ brands in a commercial game to promote their products or services to the target demographic (e.g., male 18-34). With in-game advertising, multiple brands are typically displayed in the background of the game (e.g., a billboard in a car-racing game). Game players are often incidentally exposed to the brands embedded in games while playing games (Lee & Faber, 2007; Yang, Roskos-Ewoldsen, Dinu, & Arpan, 2006). Another type of in-game brand placements is the advergame, a free online game primarily developed for promoting advertisers’ brands or branded products. In a typical advergame, one brand is featured (Mallinckrodt & Mizerski, 2007) and the embedded brand or product is a central part of the game. Advergames are relatively easy to play, thus attracting casual adult gamers or children. Advergames are available on brand websites and drive traffic to brand websites (Cauberghe & De Pelsmacker, 2010; Gross, 2010). Research on in-game advertising and advergames has received extensive scholarly attention in the past decade since Nelson’s (2002) seminal study on the effectiveness of product placements in a computer racing game was published in Journal of Advertising Research. An overview of previous research on ingame advertising and advergames is briefly presented in Table 25.1. Among various aspects identified in the integrated approach to advertising theory (see Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1), this chapter endeavors to examine in-game advertising and advergames as an advertising channel that conveys advertisers’ messages to receivers, both adults and children. Specifically, this chapter will review key findings of prior studies on in-game advertising and advergames while highlighting theories applied in those studies. In doing so, major psychological mechanisms that explain how in-game brand placements influence brand memory, attitude, or product choice will be discussed. In addition, this chapter will describe how game players’ characteristics and strategic features of brand placements affect players’ processing of brand placements in games. A systematic understanding of previous work on in-game advertising and advergames provides scholars with directions for future research in these areas, and helps identify room for improvement to conduct theoretically and methodologically rigorous studies.
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