THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN VIDEO GAMES

Zachary Glass
ABSTRACT: Previous studies suggest that the presentation of an advertisement largely determines how well consumers receive the message. Video games have many elements that make them ideal platforms for advertisements. For this study, participants played a video game that featured branded products, then took an implicit associations test to determine whether they had more positive attitudes toward the brands in the game than toward a set of equivalently rated brands. All three hypotheses are supported by the results. Participants categorize in-game brands as "good" significantly faster than they categorize them as "bad." Participants also categorize in-game brands as good significantly faster than they categorize out-of-game brands as good. Finally, they take significantly longer to categorize the in-game brands as bad than they take to categorize the out-of-game brands as bad.

In the golden age of advertising, when Madison Avenue was home to one of the most glamorous businesses in the world, selling was simple: Tell the public about the benefits of your product (e.g., "Winston cigarettes taste good"), and do it in a catchy way so people remember those benefits when it comes time to make a purchase ("Winston tastes good-like a cigarette should!"). Today, the job of the advertiser is a bit more complicated. Endless clutter distracts consumers from the message, people have shorter attention spans, and cynical views of advertising have become the norm. To add to these factors, digital video recorders are reducing the visibility of television advertising by allowing viewers to fast-forward over commercials. With all of these obstacles in place, advertisers have had to create new ways to reach consumers. One of those ways is product placement. Product placement in video games is a relatively new and extremely fast growing advertising technique. Yet the significant amounts of advertising dollars being spent on this new medium make investigating and optimizing its effectiveness crucially important. The goal of this study is to determine whether video game product placement is effective in changing consumers' brand attitudes. LITERATURE REVIEW As an advertising technique, product placement involves inserting a brand or product into a movie, television show, book, or video game. One of the most well-known product placements, for Reese's Pieces in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg 1982), involved several main characters interacting with the candies, with a result of an 80% increase in sales (Zazza 2002). The huge increase in sales may have been an aberration, helped by the recent launch of the candy, its unfamiliarity, and its low sales prior to the film. The lesson holds true though that when placed in the hands of a character

that the public knows and loves, a product gains something in the eyes of those consumers. It did not take long for advertisers to realize that product placement could work in other media. In 1987, product placement made the jump from the movies and television to video games. Product placement in video games started out as games centered on the brand's spokescharacters (usually a mascot who represents the brand). In 1987, Town & Country Surf Designs launched the game Town and Country Surf Designs: Wood and Water Rage for the Nintendo Entertainment System. A surfing and skating game, it allowed gamers to play as spokescharacters for the surf shop, such as "Thrilla Gorilla" and "Tiki Man." In the wake of Wood and Water Rage, several more games with product tie-ins released, including Avoid the 'Noid (Domino's Pizza), California Raisins: The Grape Escape (California Raisin Advisory Board),and Mad Mix (Pepsi). This game genre was not merely a marketing experiment of the late 1980s though. A shining contemporary example, the Xbox 360 game Sneak King, was released in November 2006. Sneak King is a promotional game that Burger King customers can receive with their purchase of a value meal. It involves taking control of the Burger King mascot, The King, sneaking up on hungry people, and giving them burgers before they pass out. The spokescharacter genre of video game thus is the most obvious manifestation of video game product placement, though much more subtle branding also exists in video games today. The video game Web site www.mobygames.com offers a comprehensive, categorized database of all video games, from the advent of gaming to the present day. A search of the "Advertising/Product tie-ins" category reveals three major types of product placement in video games (MobyGames 2006): monopolization, billboarding, and utilization. Monopolization occurs when a brand totally monopolizes a game; thus, the product tie-in/spokescharacter games offer
JournalofInteractiveAdvertising,Vol8No1(Fall2007),pp.2332. 2010AmericanAcademyofAdvertising,Allrightsreserved ISSN15252019

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examples of monopolizations. In contrast, billboarding is a fairly straightforward method of product placement in which advertisements for products show up in natural places within the environment of the game (e.g., billboards, flyers, Jumbotron ads in stadiums). Probably the most common form of video game product placement, billboarding also has become even more attractive with the development of new technology that allows advertisers to purchase space in an online game for a set period of time. After an advertising campaign has run its course, advertisers can introduce a fresh campaign into the video game environment. For example, in the online game Second Life, players interact in a virtual world and may view an actual billboard for Honda; if Honda decides to start a new campaign, it easily can change that billboard to a more current version. Finally, utilization represents a more involved version of product placement in which the characters in the game use the products in a natural way. For example, in a sports game, a team may wear Adidas uniforms; in a car racing game, the pit crews may use Castrol brand motor oil (both examples are taken from real games). All three methods have a very clear goal: Increase sales of the featured brand. Ideally, video game product placements reach the 18-34-year-old male demographic and increase awareness of the advertised brands. Given that that "young men spend 12.5 hours a week playing video games, compared with 9.8 hours a week watching television" (Kim 2006, p. C1), video game product placement should be an excellent medium for reaching this demographic. However, the question is whether product placement in video games does what it is supposed to do-or does it just get tuned out by the player, much like television commercials or Internet banner ads? Most research on product placement pertains to awareness of the brand, but such information is useful only to a certain extent. Getting people to see the advertisement is the first hurdle, but a substantial body of research already addresses increasing brand awareness. In addition, very concrete methods allow verifying the number of consumers who see any given advertisement-Nielsen ratings for television shows, box office returns for movies, and hits on a Web page, just to name a few. There are also ways to determine how long a player in a video game spends looking at product placements by testing how fast the average player moves through a given part of the game and combining that information with game sales. Finding out how many people see an ad is easy; the question advertisers should really be asking is: How can we tell whether the advertisement makes people like our brand more? This question is addressed in the ensuing research. Creative Ad Placement In the study "The Medium as a Contextual Cue: Effects of Creative Media Choice," Dahl (2005) looks into the differences between ads placed in traditional media and ads placed in creative media. Using two fictional products to test the hypothesis that ads placed in creative media induce more positive feelings about the brand than ads placed in traditional media, Dahl compares the feelings of participants toward the brands advertised in both settings. Ads shown in creative media induce more positive feelings about the brand and more credibility for the ad (Dahl 2005). These findings imply that ad placements in video games have the potential to induce more positive feelings about the brands advertised and lend more credibility to the brands as well. Dahl also mentions that surprise may be a mediational factor in the relationship between creative ad placement and positive feelings, which would bode well for a clever product placement in video games, as in the game Fight Night Round 3, the game used in this study. Research on Spokescharacters Garretson and Burton (2005) find that spokescharacters can be very effective marketing tools. To investigate whether using spokescharacters raises consumers' positive brand attitudes, they test various methods for conveying information about a brand through an integrated marketing communications (IMC) campaign. An IMC campaign attempts to reach consumers with the same message through multiple avenues, such as Ray Ban's Men in Black campaign. The classic black sunglasses worn by the heroes, played by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in the film, also appeared before the film's release, during its run, and well after it left theatres in print and online ads, and scenes from the film appeared in television and radio ads. This IMC campaign illustrates the many ways advertisers can reach consumers with the same message. Garretson and Burton (2005) use fictional products to eliminate preconceived notions about the brands and test participants' brand attitudes after they manipulate these fictional IMC campaigns according to several independent variables (e.g., verbal description of brand attributes versus use of a spokescharacter). To a greater extent than their other variables, "the use of spokes-characters results in more favorable brand attitudes" (Garretson and Burton 2005, p. 1). Thus, spokescharacters can be useful marketing tools, not just brightly colored, smiling animals ( la Tony the Tiger). Moreover, product placements create unconventional

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spokescharacters for products, because any character seen using the product becomes a type of spokescharacter. Garretson and Niedrich (2004) also take a more in-depth look at the role of spokescharacters by investigating several attributes to determine how they affect consumers' brand attitudes. One of the biggest determinants of increased positive brand attitudes is perceived trustworthiness, which positively affects the brand attitudes of consumers with little brand experience (Garretson and Niedrich 2004) and thus implies that consumers who are new to a brand but see it being used by someone they consider trustworthy (e.g., a character in a movie, video game, or television show) will form more positive opinions about that brand. This implication is especially important for video game product placement. In video games, players typically play as a character, which sometimes uses advertised products in the games. For example, a popular genre in current games is "firstperson shooters." In first-person shooters, players take the perspective of their character, which creates a certain bond between the player and the character. In the well-known category of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, players are particularly invested in their characters, because it takes weeks, months, and sometimes years to build their characters' attributes to compete at the highest levels. The name of the genre itself, "role-playing games," implies just how involved players are with their characters. Recognizing this high level of involvement and attachment is crucial in understanding just how much power an in-game advertisement can have. If the player in a sense becomes the character, he or she takes over the role of spokesperson for any brand the character uses. In line with the results of the two previous studies (i.e., spokescharacters, especially trustworthy spokescharacters, foster positive brand attitudes), a virtual extension of the player that serves as the spokesperson for the brand should create even stronger positive brand attitudes. Immersion, Interactivity and Implicit Advertising A key distinction between product placement in video games and product placement in movies or television is the element of interactivity. Research shows that imagined interaction with a brand produces better brand attitudes (Escalas 2004). In particular, in research investigating how narrative transportation theory-which states that mental simulation, in the form of a narrative, causes people to become immersed or lost in the story (Green and Brock 2000)-applies to advertising, Escalas (2004) argues that when participants imagine themselves using a product in a narrative context, they do not distinguish between strong and weak rationales for buying the product. That is, when participants are immersed in the narrative, they are distracted from the advertisement and therefore do not think critically about it. In addition, if the mental simulation evokes positive feelings, those feelings get transferred to the advertised product. The study results support this hypothesis and can be directly applied to product placements in video games. Because video games are facilitated mental simulations, they should immerse the player in the game world, even more than if the player were just imagining going through the story of the game. The video game should take the player's guard down when it comes to advertisements, and more involved games may make it nearly impossible to concentrate on the game and think critically about the advertisements at the same time. In addition, if the game is fun and the player is having a good time, positive feelings about the game should extend to the products advertised in the game. In another study, Homer (2006) investigates the role of cognition in advertising, with the argument that previous research overemphasizes this role, so she uses an affectively driven advertising context. Creating an affectively driven advertising context requires removing all brand attribute information, leaving only the atmosphere created by the ad; there are no brand names, no concrete benefits (e.g., fewer calories), and not even any abstract benefits (e.g., sophisticated). A running shoe ad featuring a runner on a mountain path, with a headline about comfort and a tagline with the logo, would be stripped down to just the image of the runner on the path. Homer (2006, p. 5) posits that with all of the more concrete cognitive processing taken out of the equation, "ad-induced affect impacts brand attitude directly," and the results support her hypothesis. Positive feelings invoked by the ad correlate positively with hedonic attitudes and utilitarian attitudes toward the brand. In terms of video game product placement, an advertisement does not have to include benefits or appeal to a consumer's logical side to do its job. Because video games create a specific atmosphere, designed by the game developers specifically to invoke positive feelings in the player, advertised products in video games can use that same atmosphere to appeal to players. That is, the atmosphere is already created for them; advertisers merely have to plug their products into it in a natural way to ensure the products get noticed but do not detract from the game's ambiance. This study's resultant emphasis on affect and the more subconscious brain functioning that goes into forming brand attitudes provides good justification for using the

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implicit associations test (IAT) to test brand attitudes rather than using measures that rely on self-reports. To investigate the differences between implicit and explicit advertising, Van Kuran (2003) considers a very subtle form of product placement to determine if it invokes more positive brand attitudes than traditional advertising. Participants watched a clip from a television show with a product placement for one brand and then three commercials for different brands. However, the results fail to support the hypothesis that participants view brands more favorably when they see them in product placements than in commercials. Although in the lab setting of this study, participants paid equal amounts of attention to the content in the show and that of the commercials, because they knew they were participating in an experiment, in the real world, they probably would have paid more attention to the in-show content than to the commercials. In addition, this study, similar to all the studies previously cited, uses self-reports to determine brand attitudes, which creates obvious limitations in that the method forces participants to think actively about their attitudes rather than measuring their subconscious thoughts and feelings. Finally, a study of interactive advertising (Grigorovici and Constantin 2004) investigates two different types of in-game advertising and their impact on brand recall, recognition, and preference. Brands presented as billboards may be more readily recalled than brands presented as product placements within the game environment, possibly because the billboards simply are easier to see than some product placements. The easiest product placement to see (a BMW car) achieved higher recall than any other brand, regardless of presentation. This study also suggests that users would have a greater preference for brands presented as product placements rather than as billboards, but the authors do not find support for this hypothesis. However, the formation of brand preferences based on product placement is, at least in part, a subconscious process, whereas the measure employed in Grigorovici and Constantin's (2004) study to determine brand preference involves conscious effort, namely, a postexperiment online questionnaire. To circumvent this issue, this study uses a proven, subconscious measure of brand attitudes in the IAT. CURRENT STUDY Justification Previous studies provide ample evidence of the potential effectiveness of video game product placement in terms of creating positive brand attitudes. First, creative ad placement induces positive feelings and brand credibility more effectively than traditional ad placement (Dahl 2005), and creative, sometimes surprising product placements in video games should have a similar effect. Second, trustworthy spokescharacters increase positive brand attitudes (Garretson and Burton 2005; Garretson and Neidrich 2004), and because playable characters in games often use real products, they become such spokescharacters for the brands. Third, by having participants imagine themselves using a product, advertisers eliminate the need to include strong arguments about product benefits (Escalas 2004). The complex narrative of many video games leaves little room for mentioning product benefits, but because of participants' identification with the character, that may not be an issue. Fourth, the atmosphere of an advertisement is an important factor in brand attitude formation (Homer 2006); similarly, the atmosphere created by the video game should play a large part. Thus, video games possess many characteristics that make them an ideal platform for advertisements, but it remains important to test them directly to determine whether they are really as effective for forming positive brand attitudes in players as theory would suggest. Purpose This study attempts to determine the effectiveness of video game product placement on short-term brand attitudes. To minimize the problems associated with self-reported brand attitudes, it employs the IAT to measure brand attitudes. Specifically, the IAT involves comparing brands with other brands and measuring the differences between the participants' responses. For the test to remain effective, the brands being compared must appear equivalent before the manipulation. To determine brand equivalency, an online survey asks participants to rate brands on a 10-point Likert scale; the study then uses those brands closest to each other. Primarily, this study investigates whether video game product placement can alter brand attitudes in general. However, one of the characteristics that makes video game product placement so different from television or film product placement is the element of interactivity. According to previous studies, the interactive nature of the game gets participants more involved with the products (Escalas 2004), and the positive feelings induced by the game should extend to positive feelings toward the featured products (Homer 2006). The effects of interactivity on brand attitudes also may be significant; therefore, instead of using pre- and posttest

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measures, this study uses a within-groups design with counterbalancing to eliminate any order effects. HYPOTHESES After playing a game, participants should have more favorable brand attitudes toward brands that appear within the game. The attitude measures rely on the IAT, discussed in greater depth in the Materials section. H1: In the implicit associations test, participants put ingame brands in their "good" category faster than they put them in their "bad" category. H2: In the implicit associations test, participants categorize the in-game brands as "good" faster than equivalently rated brands that are not in the game. H3: In the implicit associations test, participants take longer to categorize the in-game brands as "bad" than equivalently rated brands that are not in the game. METHOD Participants Using e-mails delivered through the social networking site Facebook.com, 133 (77 male and 56 female) college students were solicited for participation in the online survey. For the main study, 28 (17 male and 11 female) college students from Pomona College and Scripps College agreed to participate in response to e-mails that offered entry in a raffle for a gift certificate of their choice, worth $50. Materials The actual study involves a television, Xbox 360 gaming console, Xbox 360 controller, Fight Night Round 3 video game, and a computer. In addition, a modified form of the IAT, which itself represents a version of the Generic Implicit Associations Test Program (Greenwald 2001-2003, 2005), was designed to fit this study using Super Lab software. The test consists of two categories, into which participants could assign the brands: "good" and "bad." These particular words offer unambiguous meanings and a strongly dichotomous nature; in addition, they are as close to equal and opposite as any two words can get. The brands that participants categorized include four brands featured in the video game and four comparable brands (i.e., rated as equivalent to the in-game brands on an online survey). The IAT offers an effective measure of brand attitudes, because it requires participants to categorize brands faster than they would be able to think about their categorizations consciously. Procedure Online Survey. Participants clicked a link to a survey hosted on Surveymonkey.com. They then were prompted to "Please rate the following brands from 1 to 10 (1 being generally bad, and 10 being generally good)." Next, they rated seven athletic apparel brands, including Everlast and Under Armor (two ingame brands), followed by six fast-food brands, including the in-game brand, Burger King. Finally, participants rated six automobile brands, including Dodge, the in-game brand. Recall that the brands rated closest to the in-game brands also appear in the IAT for the main study. Main Study. When participants walked into the lab, they received a briefing about the experiment: They would have a short amount of time to learn the basic controls of a boxing video game, play the game, and conclude by taking a test on a computer. After signing a statement of informed consent that mentioned the game had some fairly graphic violence, participants had one minute to look over the set of controls for the video game. While they looked over the controls, the experimenter informed them which controls they would use most often to simplify and expedite the learning process. After the minute, the game started. The first thing the participants saw was a loading screen with their fighter outfitted in Under Armor trunks and gloves, matched up against an opponent. They were told the fighter on the left was the character they would be controlling in the fight. After the game finished loading, the announcer came on and introduced the fighters. When he introduced each participant's fighter, the boxer came out with Burger King's mascot, The King, as his promoter. Participants were then reminded that the fighter on the screen was "them." After the opposing fighter was introduced, the boxing match began. During the course of the match, participants received positive reinforcement from the experimenter to make the atmosphere similar to a real-world experience if the participant were playing the game with friends in a natural environment, as well as to enhance the participants' positive experiences. During the fight, most participants knocked their opponent to the ground at least once, adding a sense of accomplishment. After approximately five minutes, the first round ended, and participants were informed that it was time to take the test on the computer.

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Participants walked out of the lab room and to a nearby computer, where they were to follow the instructions on the screen and direct any questions to the experimenter, who was waiting nearby. The IAT began with a prompt and a sample mini-test to get participants acquainted with the procedure they would use for the real test. The mini-test involved categorizing words like "puppy," "smile," "death," and "hate" into either the good or the bad category using the E and I keys of the keyboard. Participants pressed E for good and I for bad. Once participants completed the mini-test, they moved on to the crux of the experiment. Participants receive a list of the four in-game brands (Burger King, Everlast, Under Armor, and Dodge) and the four equivalent brands (McDonald's, Converse, Nike, and Chrysler) and then had one minute to memorize which brands were on which list. Note that participants were not told that one list consisted of brands they had just seen in the game; the two lists were simply labeled "Y Brands" and "Z Brands." In the test, participants categorized one list of brands into the good category and the other into the bad category. In one trial, participants were prompted to categorize the Y Brands (i.e., in-game brands) in the good category and the equivalent Z Brands in the bad category. The names of the brands flashed on the screen, and participants pressed either E for good or I for bad. If they made a mistake, the brands appeared again, from the beginning of the list. The presentation order was randomized to eliminate any order effects. In another trial, participants were prompted to categorize Y Brands (in-game brands) into the bad category and the equivalent Z Brands into the good category using the same keys and another random order of the brands. The software kept track of the time it took participants to categorize the brands into each category (i.e., elapsed time between the brand flashing on the screen and when participants pressed the correct key). In addition to the random brand order within the trials, the experiment was counterbalanced to eliminate any order effects between the first and second trials. That is, half the participants categorized the Y Brands as good in the first trial and bad in the second, and the other half categorized them as bad in the first trial and good in the second. RESULTS Online Survey Participants rated the 19 brands from generally bad (1) to generally good (10) (see Tables 1-3 for complete results). The athletic brand rated closest to the in-game Everlast brand (4.85) was Converse (5.60). Of the athletic brands not featured in the game, Nike (7.46) rated closest to Under Armor (7.48). In the fast-food category, McDonald's (4.36) rated closest to Burger King (4.64), and among car brands, the closest to Dodge (4.95) was Chrysler (5.04). Overall, the average rating for the in-game brands is 5.48, and the average rating for the equivalent brands reaches 5.62. Table 1. Mean Ratings for Sporting Goods Brands

Table 2. Mean Ratings for Fast Foods Brands

Table 3. Mean Ratings for Car Brands

MAIN STUDY To put all four in-game brands in the good category, participants took a mean of 3,986.00 ms; the mean time it took them to put the four in-game brands in the bad category is 5,172.09 ms. A paired samples t-test confirms that this difference is significant (t (28) = -2.135, p = .042), in support of H1. The mean time to put the four in-game brands in the good category, 3,986.00 ms, is significantly less than the mean time it took to put the four equivalent brands in the good category, 5,172.97 ms. In support of H2, the paired sample t-test confirms this significance (t (28) = -2.256, p = .032). Participants took 5,172.09 ms to put the four in-game brands in the bad category but 4,071.52 ms to assign the four equivalent brands to the bad category. This significant difference (t (28) = 2.322, p = .028) confirms H3. (See Table 4 for the complete results).

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Table 4. Combined Mean Times (milliseconds) for Participants to Categorize Brands The results also support H2, which indicates participants did not simply rate the brands the way they did because they had preconceived positive feelings about them. The online survey established that participants actually had slightly more positive attitudes toward the brands that were not in the game than the in-game brands. Thus, the game appears to have changed participants' brand attitudes. If the only data available were the data from these first two tests, the results might be explained by a mere exposure effect; that is, participants had just been primed by seeing the brand names, and their mere exposure made those brands more familiar and more readily accessible in participants' memory for placement into the good category. However, the mere exposure effect cannot explain the results derived from the statistical test of H3. The support for H3 clarifies that participants did not just categorize the in-game brands faster in general because of their familiarity with the brands. (If this were the case, participants would press the key for the in-game brands faster than that for the out-of-game brands, regardless of whether it signified good or bad.) Instead, something actually inhibited participants from putting the in-game brands in the bad category. Again, because the online survey reveals slightly higher ratings for the out-of-game brands, the most logical explanation for this result is that the positive experience participants had during their gaming session put the brands in the good category in their minds even before they began the IAT. This subconscious precategorization suggests it does not matter whether participants were told to categorize the ingame brands as good or bad. Rather, they categorized the brands during the gaming session, and this categorization was stronger than any arbitrary categorization they were told to make during the IAT. The duration of time spent playing the game compared with the very brief duration of time spent categorizing the brands in the IAT also might contribute to the strength of this subconscious precategorization. The post-hoc tests also show that though each brand pairing follows group trends, only one (Under Armor and Nike) is significant on its own, perhaps because Under Armor received more time on the screen than any other brand. Under Armor logos appeared on the boxer's glove and trunks, which were visible throughout the entire gaming session; in contrast, Everlast and Dodge appeared only on the floor of the ring (slightly visible during most game play and highly visible during knockdowns), and Burger King was only in the game for about 30 seconds at the beginning when The King came out with the boxer. It is interesting to note that whereas Under Armor (most visible) attains the greatest difference compared

In addition to these tests, post-hoc paired sample t-tests indicate whether participants rated all individual brands in the hypothesized direction or if particular brand pairings are responsible for the significant results in support of the hypotheses. All brand pairings are rated in the hypothesized direction (i.e., in-game good rating occurs faster than in-game bad; in-game good rating occurs faster than out-of-game good; and in-game bad rating occurs slower than out-of-game bad). However, only one brand pairing is significantly different by itself. Specifically, the mean time participants take to put Under Armor in the good category is 914.64 ms compared with 1,347.36 ms to categorize Nike as good. The paired samples t-test confirms that this difference is significant (t (28) = -2.779, p = .010). In addition, participants put Under Armor in the bad category in 1284.62 ms and Nike in the bad category in 856.51 ms. Again, the paired samples t-test confirms a significant difference (t (28) = -2.386, p = .024). DISCUSSION The most fundamental hypothesis of this study receives support: Participants put in-game brands in the good category faster than they put those brands in the bad category. Thus, some mechanism in the mind of participants is being triggered by these brands. Even though nearly every participant admitted during the debriefing that they did not realize the Y Brands all appeared in the game they had just played, those brands registered with their subconscious and, even better for marketers, registered as good and not bad. Perhaps participants registered these brands as good in their minds because of their positive experience while playing the game. That is, the difficulty of the game was such that most participants could knock down their opponent at least once, and they constantly received positive reinforcement and encouragement from the experimenter while they were playing. Basically, this study confirms that when consumers have fun with a certain product, they are more likely to have positive feelings toward it. Thus, video game product placement represents an effective way to get consumers to "play" with advertised products and have fun doing it, before they even decide to purchase.

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with its equivalent brand, Burger King (least visible) results in the smallest difference with its out-of-game counterpart. In addition, if participants did not recognize The King character or see the small Burger King logo on his crown, they may not have associated him with the Burger King brand. This possible confusion might have contributed further to the relatively small difference between Burger King and McDonald's. Additional studies should be conducted to determine whether the amount of screen time affects brand attitude changes in this context. If it turns out that screen time affects brand attitude changes, advertisers will want to design product placements that reflect the character, such as branded clothing or cars, as opposed to billboards. One limitation of this study involves the small sample size of the experimental group (N = 28). Budget limitations forced this research to be conducted on a small scale. It therefore would be useful to conduct similar research on a much larger scale and with more variables investigated. The results of this study are very clear-cut, but for these conclusions to mean anything, the IAT must be confirmed as a valid measure of brand attitudes. The IAT previously has been (and still is) used as a valid and respected measure for items involving topics such as religious biases and attitudes about social issues. For example, one form of the IAT measures how much people espouse the stereotype that women are better at liberal arts and men are better at math and science. If the test can measure these attitudes, why can not it measure something like brand attitudes? Whether someone prefers McDonald's over Burger King should not be any harder to measure than whether someone subconsciously thinks women are not as good as men at math. One of the advantages of using the IAT over a typical brand attitude survey is that the IAT is just what it claims to be: implicit. Most research done by marketers involves heavyhanded surveys that ask blunt questions about how people feel about brands, products, commercials, and so forth. There is nothing really scientific about this research, and they are notoriously inaccurate. Participants in these focus groups often overanalyze their own thoughts to the point that their answers on surveys are not reflections of their gut feelings toward the brands. The IAT removes all conscious overthinking by participants and gets right to gut feelings. While taking the IAT, participants lack the time to think about each one of their answers, because if they hesitate more than three and one-half seconds, the test automatically moves on to the next brand, and their response gets counted as an error. Another advantage of the IAT is that the test design levels the playing field between the two groups of brands. Some studies use logos to measure brand attitudes toward advertising effectiveness, but logos complicate the issue at hand. Some are more recognizable than others, some are flashier, and some take longer to decipher. Therefore, the final version of the IAT for this study is completely text based. A typical IAT slide consists of a white screen with the word "good" on the left, the word "bad" on the right, and a brand name in the middle, several lines below "good" and "bad." All type appears in an easy-to-read, black, sans-serif font to increase the speed with which participants could read the words. In addition, the total number of letters in the combined names of the in-game brands is 33, comparable to the 29 letters in the combined names of the out-of-game brands. If the length of the brand names had affected the results, it would have made the times for the in-game brands slower, but it seems to have had no effect. In contrast, an issue with using the IAT for an experimental group and explicit survey for the control group pertains to whether the two measures assess the same kind of brand attitudes. However, the explicit online survey serves to choose brands for the IAT, and offering many different versions to many different pilot control groups would have been both time consuming and inefficient. At first, this problem seems to present a significant obstacle to the validity of the study, but in reality, it only creates an obstacle if the 28 participants in the experimental group possess preconceived, subconscious brand attitudes that contrast with the conscious brand attitudes of the 133 participants in the online survey. Because both sets of participants were chosen at random from the same population (i.e., college students), it is not likely that one group maintains different opinions. Of course, it remains possible that the two tests measure different aspects of brand attitudes, such that the online survey may measure a more explicit type of brand preference, such as which brands the participant would recommend to a friend, and the IAT indicates which brand the participant would choose when considering a store display with many different products from which to choose. It is also possible that the IAT is a good measure for impulse buyers, who make purchases on the basis of their gut feelings, with little conscious thought about each brand. More research is needed to determine exactly which aspect of brand attitudes the IAT measures and how it applies to shopping behavior. However, a striking finding of this study notes that using the IAT to measure brand attitudes proves effective, even after

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participants had played the video game for only about five minutes. Yet the typical gaming session lasts much longer. Most video game sessions last between 20 minutes and two hours (estimated from personal experiences and observations), and as noted previously, young men spend half a day per week playing video games (Kim 2006). Study participants played only one round of a boxing match that would normally take at least two rounds to finish (and possibly three or more, though judging from how well participants did in the study, the game probably would have ended in the second round for most). Even if the fight ended in the second round, the real version still represents playing twice as long as participants played in the study. If a similar study were allowed more time and more researchers, a more realistic gaming experience could be created by having players at least finish the fight. Moreover, to test the effectiveness of the product placement in the game, participants would have to play the game several times a week over an extended period of time to simulate the amount of time spent playing by someone who owns the game. In another limitation, Fight Night Round 3 contains several product placement aspects not considered directly by this study. For example, participants played as a boxer who wore Under Armor gloves, but to obtain those gloves, the boxer had to win a certain amount of money over the course of his career, which participants did not need to pursue. By making the gloves a reward or goal, advertisers increase the desirability of the product. In addition to virtually buying the gloves, real players know that the gloves give their boxer a tangible ratings boost. The particular Under Armor gloves used in this experiment improve a boxer's "power" rating by 20%. In such a tangible ratings boost, virtual products can set themselves apart from real products. That is, it would be awfully hard for an advertiser to claim that a pair of boxing gloves actually could increase the power with which a fighter hits someone by some percentage, but in the virtual world of the game, that claim is perfectly reasonable. This experiment thus shows that participants can take such a message out of the context of the game and apply it to their real brand attitudes, and possibly to their purchasing behavior. An early version of this experiment employed participants in another experimental group who watched the video game being played by someone else via video rather than playing the game themselves. Due to time limitations however, this portion of the experiment was not conducted. However, in future studies of interactivity, it would be interesting to discover whether this alteration affects the results. If these participants do not respond as well to the in-game brands in the IAT, it would suggest that interactivity plays a large role in changing brand attitudes. Finally, previous studies have laid the groundwork for this research, and all point to video games as an ideal platform for advertising. Creative brand placement, trustworthy spokescharacters, imagined product use, and atmosphere help determine brand attitudes. The results of this study confirm what seems logically true: Video games put players in a position that their guard against the clutter of advertising messages drops, and players can act as their own product spokespersons, visualize themselves using products, and have fun while doing it. If advertisers do their jobs right, gamers will see advertised products as an extension of the game. Because for many gamers, video games serve as a temporary respite from reality, they may be able to bring the game environment into their daily lives, even without playing the game, if they decide to buy the products featured in their favorite games. REFERENCES Dahl, Micael N. (2005), "The Medium as a Contextual Cue: Effects of Creative Media Choice," Journal of Advertising, 34 (3), 89-98. Escalas, J.E. (2004), "Imagine Yourself in the Product: Mental Simulation, Narrative Transportation, and Persuasion," Journal of Advertising, 33 (2), 37-48. Garretson, Judith A. and Scot Burton (2005), "The Role of Spokes-Characters as Advertisement and Package Cues in Integrated Marketing Communications," Journal of Marketing, 69, 118-132. Garretson, Judith A. and R. W. Niedrich (2004), "Creating Character Trust and Positive Brand Attitudes," Journal of Advertising, 33 (2), 25-36. Green, Melanie C. and Timothy C. Brock (2000), "The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 (5), 701-721. Greenwald, A.G. (2001-2003, 2005), Dr. Anthony Greenwald/IAT Materials. Available at http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/iat_materials.htm (accessed 9/28/06). Grigorovici, Dan M. and Corina D. Constantin (2004), "Experiencing Interactive Advertising beyond Rich Media:

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Impacts of Ad Type and Presence on Brand Effectiveness in 3D Gaming Immersive Virtual Environments," Journal of Interactive Advertising 5 (1), 1-22. Homer, Pamela M. (2006), "Relationships Among Ad-Induced Affect, Beliefs, and Attitudes: Another Look," Journal of Advertising, 35 (1), 35-51. Kim, Ryan (2006), "Video Game Ads No Longer Child's Play: Product Placement Expected to be Crucial as Online Competition Has More Timeliness," San Francisco Chronicle, (June 12), C1. Available at http://www.sfgate.com (accessed 11/29/06. MobyGames (2006), Advertising/Product Tie-ins. Available at http://www.midwestleague.com/indivpitching.html (accessed 11/28/06. Spielberg, S. (Director). (1982). E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial [Motion picture]. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios. Van Kuran, Patricia (2003), "Product Placement as the New Advertising? The Effectiveness of Implicit Processing of Advertisements," working paper, Pomona College. Zazza, Frank (2002), "Special Report: iTVX: Measuring the Quality of Product Placement." Available at http://www.itvx.com/SpecialReport.asp (accessed 11/27/06). ABOUT THE AUTHOR Zachary Glass (B.A. Pomona College) graduated with a major in psychology and a minor in media studies. His research interests include interactive advertising and the psychology of advertising. He currently works for Arnold Worldwide in Washington, DC.