臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.30 NO.3

133 NTU Management Review Vol. 30 No. 3 Dec. 2020 Effects of the Types and Contents of Video Advertisements in Mobile Games 1. Research Purpose Mobile games have become important media on which advertisers/brands will place advertisements. Based on a survey from Yahoo!Kimo, in the first half of 2017, 97% of gamers in Taiwan play online, and 80% of them play on their cell phones (Yen, 2017). And one of the key findings of the “In-Game Ad Survey 2017” is: compared with [non- rewarded] video advertisements (38%) and banners (34%), rewarded video advertisements are now the most popular advertising technique, implemented by 58% of free-to-play (F2P) games (Robinson, 2017). It is a trend to place video advertisements in mobile games and have them occur independently from the game contents. Application developers have been seriously concerning about particular types of advertisements that will reduce damages to gamers’ attitudes while earning advertising fees at the same time. And for advertisers, the following two questions are important when collaboratively designing mobile game advertisements: (1) what types of advertising strategies and contents will better promote the advertised products (usually other mobile games) during game playing and successfully attract potential consumers? (2) how to generate gamers’ curiosity and have them download the games? This study examines the two-stage effects of different types and contents of in-game video advertisements before and after players view the advertisements. We focus on investigating the effects of reward-based and permission-based advertisements on players’ viewing decisions and attitudes toward the game (i.e., the media host) before players view the advertisements. We also explore whether the game outcomes moderate these effects. Moreover we observe the direct and interactive effects of three advertisement types (i.e., reward-based vs. permission-based vs. interstitial advertisements) and advertisement contents (i.e., the dramatized versions vs. real game-scenes vs. the mixed versions) after the game players viewed the advertisements. Furthermore, this study draws on the information gap theory (Loewenstein, 1994) to explore the subsequent effects created by the curiosity mechanism (Menon and Soman, 2002). Hsuan-Yi Chou , Institute of Marketing Communication, National Sun Yat-sen University Tsai-Chen Yang , Office of Marketing Communication, Industrial Technology Research Institute