Social Signifiers of Interactive Advertising in Mobile GamingAn Empirical Study on Gamers’ Perception towards Interactive Advertisements : Social Signifiers of Interactive Advertising in Mobile GamingAn Empirical Study on Gamers’ Perception towards Intera

Sammanfattning: With the rapid growth of mobile games, more and more people are involved ingaming. As a result, a growing number of advertisers seek to promote their brands and products in mobile games. However, as previous studies on product placements were mostly focused on traditional media formats like television and movies, the unique feature of interactivity was largely missing among current studies on in-game advertising. This study aimed to investigate how interactive styles of advertisements would influence gamers’ perception of the brands as well as the gaming experience.We took the perspective from interactivity and discussed how affordances and signifiers could be connected to the interactivity in gaming. Subsequently, we developed a prototype with five different interactive advertisements for our experiments. After an experiment combined with observation, semi-structured interview and survey on 25 participants, we produced our results through qualitative thematic analysis and quantitative statistical analysis on the gathered data. Through the analysis, we found an underlying connection between the social signifiers connected to the advertisements and the users’ perception of the corresponding brands. This study produced meaningful insights on how interactive advertisements would influence gaming experiences and users’ perception of the advertised brands