Effect of nature of the game on ad-persuasion in online gaming context: Moderating roles of game-product congruence and consumer’s need for cognition

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of nature of advergame and moderating roles of game-product congruence and need for cognition (NFC) on gamers’ ad-persuasion from attention and elaboration perspectives.

A 2 (nature of game: fast or slow)×2 (game-product congruence: high or low)×2 (NFC: high or low) between measures design is used. In total, 224 graduate students participated in the study. A 2×2×2 between subjects ANOVA is used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that slow-paced advergames result in high persuasion than fast-paced advergames. A 2 way-interaction indicates that for a slow-paced advergame, low game-product congruence result in high persuasion than in high game-product congruence. Furthermore, findings reveal that for a slow-paced advergame with low game-product congruence, subjects with high NFC report high persuasion than subjects with low NFC. For a fast-paced advergame with low game-product congruence, subjects with high NFC report high persuasion than subjects with low NFC.

The findings of the study are very important for advertising practitioners as selection of media that fit the advertised product with reference to the content of the media is a planning strategy that has been widely used by media planners. Thus, if high brand recall and recognition is the primary goal for advertisers, then, slow-paced advergames with low-congruent brand placements can be considered a better media strategy for in-game advertising. Furthermore, advertising managers can design advergames by taking into account NFC factor to make sure that the implementation has the strongest positive effect on consumers’ persuasion. Furthermore, advertising managers can design advergames by taking into account NFC factor to make sure that the implementation has the strongest positive effect on consumers’ persuasion.

This research contributes to the literature of non-traditional online advertising, specifically advergaming context by exploring the impact of nature of game and game-product congruence on gamers’ ad-persuasion. Also, this study is the first attempt toward understanding the moderating role of NFC on gamers’ ad-persuasion in the context of online advertising.