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The purpose of this paper is to examine features of branded entertainment in apparel brands’ Facebook pages based on the conceptual framework of play themes (Zhang, 2010).

A content analysis was performed for 1,443 posts present on 50 apparel brands’ Facebook profile pages in the time period from November 28, 2011 to December 25, 2011.

The findings provide meaningful insights into apparel brands’ use of Facebook as a social media strategy. The most dominant branded entertainment consisted of photos and advertisements and was directed toward promoting specific products and sales without using a particular play theme. Among the play themes used, play as frivolity, which includes simple and fun activities, was predominant. Overall, apparel brands utilized limited types of branded entertainment on their Facebook pages.

By integrating play themes into branded entertainment, apparel brands can optimize their branded contents on Facebook to connect with consumers and increase consumer motivation to interact with the brand. More specifically, apparel brands that adopt additional play themes other than play as frivolity for their branded entertainment will stand out and cut through the clutter of competitors’ Facebook pages.

No previous research investigated apparel brands’ use of Facebook pages. This study fills the void in the literature by addressing how apparel brands utilize types of branded entertainment on their Facebook profile pages.

Brandfests are conceptualized as marketer-initiated events that facilitate consumers’ individual and social engagements with brands. After its inception in the late 1990s, the concept of brandfests was quickly folded into the concept of brand community, leaving conceptual and strategic opportunities untapped. The purpose of the paper is to suggest a broadened conceptualization of brandfests based on the play theory and the notion of ludic interagency.

This paper includes a longitudinal study and ethnographic method.

Unlike previously studied brandfests, this context entails a low-involvement product, a brand that is not the focal point for participants, a broad range of market-facing enactors, shifting roles and the realization of multiple meanings and values for multiple enactors. The findings demonstrate that brand meaning and value can be constituted through ludic engagement of a broad range of market-facing enactors through a ludic spectacle such as a brandfest. Moreover, the authors find that this can go on outside the established spatial and temporal frames normally considered by the marketing literature.

This has implications for theories of emplacement (servicescape) and brand meaning actualization in terms of where, when and whom is involved in brand meaning actualization.

The paper develops four strategic propositions which broaden the type of brandfests that allow managers to define a range of potential strategies for engaging consumers and other enactors in a broader range of brandfests.

The paper reconceptualizes a dormant concept in the marketing literature to develop strategic implications based on the play theory. It challenges the prevalent centrality of the brand and consumer brand involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of brand placement strength on gamers’ brand recall as moderated by gamers’ prior game playing experience and game involvement in the context of advergames. Specifically, this research utilizes Limited Capacity Model of attention to explain how and under what conditions brand placements create attention, elaboration and subsequent brand recall.

A 2 (brand placement strength: prominent versus subtle) × 2 (prior game playing experience: experienced versus inexperienced) × 2 (game involvement: high versus low involvement) between-subjects measures design is used. Empirical data were obtained from 220 undergraduate student gamers. A between-subjects measures ANOVA is used to test the hypotheses.

There are several important findings that can be inferred from the results. First, inexperienced gamers report high brand recall in prominent brand placements than subtle brand placements, whereas for experienced gamers, no significant difference in recall rates is found between prominent brand placement and subtle brand placement. Second, inexperienced gamers with low game involvement playing an advergame with prominent brand placement report high brand recall compared to inexperienced gamers with high game involvement playing an advergame with prominent brand placement.

The study contributes to the advertising literature from a non-traditional advertising perspective, particularly in the context of online advergames, and explains the role of brand placement and its boundary conditions to create customers’ brand memory. Moreover, this research contributes to the marketing knowledge on how to locate and embed the brands effectively in advergames, taking into account the individual characteristics of each advergame.

The findings are very important for advertising practitioners because selecting media that enhances the brand memory of the consumers through entertainment is a planning strategy that has been widely used by media planners today. Hence, advertising managers should think about designing advergames by taking into account the game involvement factor to make sure that the implementation has the strongest positive effect on consumers’ memory.

This research contributes to the literature of online advertising, especially the advergames by exploring the impact of brand placement strength and prior gaming experience on gamers’ brand recall. In addition, this study is the first step toward understanding the moderating role of game involvement on Indian gamers recall in the context of online advertising.

The purpose of this study is to examine how children and young adults form attitudes toward food products in unbranded gaming mobile applications and the degree to which product category attitudes can generate responses to brands in the category through the generalization process.

Two experiments exposed children and young adults to mobile games featuring food products in a between-subjects treatment versus control design to examine both affective responses and belief formation toward food brands within the category.

It was found that both children and young adults favored branded food items in the product category after playing with an unbranded mobile game assembling food products. Young adults also developed specific beliefs about nonrepresented brands in the category, which were found to be stronger under high involvement. Parents and public policymakers must be vigilant in controlling access to food-related games, even when they are not commercial in nature because of the attitudes and beliefs formed in unbranded games.

This research demonstrates that attitudes and beliefs around food brands can be formed through unbranded game play when children and young adults generalize attitudes. Because of the emphasis on “advergames,” no studies have examined the impact of unbranded games on children and young adults through the generalization process.

The purpose of this paper is to see whether children’ regulatory fit/nonfit can moderate the implicit influence of in-game advertising.

An experiment was done with 418 children (aged 7–11) from three primary schools in a middle-size city in China that voluntarily took part in the experiment. Children were randomly allocated to the following four conditions: playing a game without any brands (a control group), playing the same game and exposed to a subtle in-game advertising (a test control group), playing the same branded game with regulatory fit (regulatory fit group) and playing the same branded game with regulatory nonfit (regulatory nonfit group).

The results first suggest exposure to in-game advertising makes children more likely to choose it afterward, despite most of them are not aware being exposed to it. The results further suggest children’s regulatory fit does not further increase children’s choice of the focal brand, suggesting linking the focal brand to fun and engaging game experiences is sufficient to influence their brand choice. However, children’s regulatory nonfit attenuates the implicit influence of in-game advertising.

By focusing on children’s game strategy, this research complements the extant literature that only focuses on advertising features and/or game character to document the implicit influence of in-game advertising. In addition, by focusing on regulatory fit/nonfit, this paper provides initial evidence how contextual factors such as children’s game strategy may help them cope with advertising influence built on affect transfer.

This paper aims to investigate the ways in which “non-collaborative co-creation” can affect brand equity as perceived by independent observers. It reports a study of the different effects on that perception attributable to non-collaborative co-creation that takes the form of either “brand play” or “brand attack” and is executed either by established artists or mainstream consumers.

A 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment (brand play versus brand attack; consumer versus artist) measured observers’ perception of brand equity before and after exposure to purpose-designed co-created treatments.

Non-collaborative co-creation has a negative effect on observers’ perceptions of brand equity and brand attack, causing a stronger dilution of brand equity than brand play. Artists either mitigate the dilution or have a positive effect on those perceptions.

Future research could usefully investigate the relative susceptibility of brands to non-collaborative co-creation, the effects on brands of higher complexity than those in our experiment, exposed in higher-involvement media, and the effects of more diverse forms of co-creation.

Brand managers must recognise that co-creation carries considerable risks for brand equity. They should closely monitor and track the first signs of non-collaborative co-creation in progress. It could be beneficial to recruit artists as co-creators of controlled brand play.

This study offers a more complete insight into the effect of non-collaborative co-creation on observers’ perceptions of brand equity than so far offered by the existing literature. It connects the fields of brand management and the arts by investigating the role and impact of artists as collaborative or non-collaborative co-creators of brand equity.

Employing the conceptual framework of play themes, this study examined and reported the product categories that presented branded entertainment the most, the different types and features of branded entertainment, and how various play themes were incorporated in branded entertainment in the context of Facebook brand profile pages. The major findings were consistent with the conceptual framework and literature on branded entertainment. Some unexpected findings were also provided and discussed. The line between entertainment and marketing communication has become increasingly blended or even erased during recent years, particularly in the Internet context. Researchers and practitioners are highly interested in the marketing potential of branded entertainment since it may boost brand awareness and build strong consumer‐brand relationships. Little academic research to date has been conducted to systematically study branded entertainment on the Internet. This study is a nascent attempt to understand branded entertainment in user‐centered social networking websites (SNWs), since young users are shifting away from other online media to SNWs. Branded entertainment may help marketers gather segmented yet fun‐seeking SNW users and deliver nonintrusive marketing messages to them.

Advergames, or integrated brand messages within digital games, have received considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. Despite increased use of advergames as a brand promotion strategy by a range of well-known brands, limited understanding exists about a number of issues related to the effective use of such games. This paper aims to critically review the literature on advergames by performing a detailed analysis of existing research in this area and propose an organizing framework. Based on this framework, the authors discuss key issues with current understanding and propose important questions for future research.

This literature review follows Webster and Watson’s (2002) concept-driven systematic review methodology elaborating on the key antecedents and consequences identified in advergame studies (what we know: current knowledge), followed by the discussion of key factors that should be investigated as antecedents and consequences (literature gaps).

This paper presents a review and synthesis of advergame studies based on Terlutter and Capella’s (2013) integrated marketing communication framework. It identifies game, individual and social factors and suggests how these factors could affect a consumer’s brand-related cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral responses. The authors further propose an advergame framework that identifies two different “unit of analysis” (antecedents and consequences of game factors and antecedents and consequences of individual and social factors), which can be used by scholars to center their research efforts in a more detailed fashion.

Research questions posed in this literature review indicate that future research in the area of advergames should focus on investigating the effects of various game, individual and social factors on consumers’ cognitive, affective and behavioral responses.

The advergame framework provided here provides firms with a guide to the factors that may affect their consumers’ cognitive, affective and behavioral responses and helps them in developing effective advergames.

The paper provides a comprehensive review of the advergame literature that has not been done before and develops a general advergame framework that can be applied in all contexts and will guide future studies in the area. Overall, the study helps the researchers to identify critical issues and concepts related to advergames and shapes future research in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how healthy eating involvement (HEI) impacts the evaluations of branded food advergames.

This paper invokes the elaboration likelihood model and reactance theory to explain the effects of different levels of brand integration within a food advergame on individuals with different reported levels of HEI. Undergraduate students were assigned (non-random) to play one of three different advergames with varying levels of brand integration. Furthermore, participant’s health involvement was measured and incorporated as a moderating variable on brand and advergame attitudes. Regression analyses were used to analyze the data.

The results showed significant interaction effects between HEI levels and level of brand advergame integration. Individuals with higher levels of HEI showed more negative attitudes toward the brand and game when integration was high. However, lower levels of brand advergame integration resulted in positive effects among lower HEI individuals.

Limitations of this research are that gamer experience was not measured prior to game play. Also, that no control of advergame playing time was conducted. However, a manipulation check was conducted. Future research should examine the impact of healthy advergames on individual’s reactions and information processing.

Editors and creators of advergames must be more aware of the impact that branded items have within a gaming situation. Individuals may not always positively evaluate the brand integrated within a fun online environment. Furthermore, better consumer targeting will likely lead to higher message acceptance based upon individuals levels of self-congruency with that message.

This study provides needed examination of contextual and individual level variables in responses to advergaming content.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of in‐game placements on the explicit memory of Indian gamers and understand their attitude towards this form of communication. It attempts to find out whether the memory effects differ due to the nature of the games. The avenues for in‐game placements for the rapidly growing Indian video gaming industry are discussed.

The effect of the nature of the game on the recall and recognition is measured using a sample of 240 gamers; two games of different nature (fast versus slow) are used as stimuli and the recall and recognition of the in‐game placements are compared. Subsequently the perceptions towards this type of placement are tapped. The moderating effect of gaming experience on the explicit memory is also tested.

The paper finds that in‐game placements do affect the explicit memory of gamers. Games with lower perceptual load (slow game) result in a significantly higher recall and recognition as compared to the games with higher perceptual load (fast game). Indian players have a positive attitude towards placements in this medium and do not find this practice either intrusive or unethical.

Further research using different combinations of games is required to confirm, expand and generalize the findings.

This medium provides an opportunity to brand managers and game developers as an alternative communication vehicle. In‐game placements provide an avenue to companies as they are cost effective, they facilitate building brand awareness and are not viewed negatively.

The arena of in‐game placements is an unexplored one in India. This study is the first step towards understanding views and effects of in‐game placements on Indian gamers and may encourage more research in this field.