| Advergames are online games that are developed to promote advertising and marketing content. They have become a unique and effective medium for advertisers to reinforce their brands in compelling ways. This study has explored conditions under which a brand name included in an advergame would be remembered and positively evaluated. Brand placement proximity, game involvement, and game-product congruity were identified as three important factors underlying these processes as they interact to influence memory for the brands embedded in the game and attitudes toward those brands. The hypotheses and research question concerning game players' reactions to these variables were investigated on the basis of an experimental study in which subjects were directed to play an advergame and asked to indicate their reactions to the brands embedded in the game.; This study found that focal brand placement led to superior memory of and more favorable attitudes toward brand names embedded in the game compared to peripheral brand placement. This study further demonstrated the moderating role of game involvement on the brand placement proximity-brand recognition relationship. It was found that under moderate game involvement, subjects exposed to focal brand placement were significantly more likely to recognize brand names than those exposed to peripheral brand placement in the game. Under high involvement, however, the recognition superiority of the focal brands (compared to the peripheral brands) did not emerge. Finally, as for the game-product congruity, this study found that highly incongruent brands were better recalled than either highly congruent or moderately incongruent brands. Implications for advertising scholars and practitioners were also discussed. |
