Impact of Involvement and Cognitive Load on Affective Responses to Advergames and In-Game Advertising

It has been long known that there are different ways of communicating promotional messages with branded entertainments. Among all, the two of them are notable; communicating the message through advergames and integrating the message/brand in the game; known as in game advertising (IGA). Deriving the positive effects of both from the literature, different variables that may reduce or increase the efficacy of them are studied. This study is an attempt to understand the effect of different variables on affective responses to advergames. In the paper, it is suggested from the literature that cognitive overload affects affective responses (i.e. attitudes toward the branded entertainment and the main brand that the game is specifically designed for) of game players. The authors aim to develop hypotheses trying to explain the effect of cognitive overload stimuli on the attitudes of the gamers. In the paper authors also suggested hypotheses about how involvement may affect cognitive overload outcomes. All those hypotheses are developed both for the advergames and IGA. As the last section, future research that will help to test these hypotheses are provided.