Research on the Effectiveness of Advertising in Videogames: State of the Art

Abstract

Advertising through videogames is acquiring increasing prominence as a marketing communications tool for organisations. Be it through the use of product placement in videogames, in-game advertising or advergaming, the use of videogames as a marketing communications tool has seen an important increase in the last few years in the marketing budgets of organisations. Together with this increase in the commercial implementation, there has also been an increase in academic research that has centered its attention on the use of video games as an advertising tool. The present exploratory work analyses 19 academic articles that have studied different areas of advertising effcacy in the use of video games as an advertising tool. The main objective of this work is to identify the principal lines of research as well as the principal methodologies and factors used. Using the contents analysis as an investigative tool, the article shows the state of the matter of the academic research on the effcacy of advertising through video games and highlights potential areas of interest where there is a scarcity of academic research and, therefore, offers new opportunities to researchers.