- Thank you, so, thanks for the introduction.
Yeah, hi, my name is Max, and I'm presenting
Gamified Ads: Bridging the Gap Between User Enjoyment
and the Effectiveness of Online Ads,
which is work I did together with Kathrin Dernbechev,
Vladislav Hnatovskiy, Marc Schubhan, Pascal Lessel,
and Antonin Kruger.
So, I think we all know online ads,
and we all know that online ads are often
disruptively competing for our attention
and are not just annoying, but often provide
a bad user experience.
And therefore, more and more users install
so-called ad blockers, which basically prevent ads
from loading on a webpage.
This is, of course, good for users
because web services can then be accessed
free of charge and free of advertising,
so without seeing any ads.
But it's highly problematic for those web service providers,
as they lose a quite big bunch of money every year
because of ad block usage.
So, the current solution is that web services
and Internet platforms started excluding people
using ad blockers from accessing the website.
So, for example, here we see The Business Insider webpage,
and it detects that you're using an ad blocker
and shows you the message that you either have to pay
or you deactivate your ad blocker right away.
And, we thought about whether this is really
the best solution or whether we could come up
with something different, and we came up
with the idea of gamified ads, which basically means
to playfully deactivate ads, as a way
to bridge the gap between both interest groups,
like web service providers and users.
To start, we did brainstorming sessions
to create eight game ideas to deactivate ads playfully.
And we oriented them on well-known games,
as this is a quite new approach.
And we created storyboards to kind of
visualize our ideas and present them
to users early on.
And I will now try to quickly go through
all those eight storyboards that we created.
The first one, you can see on the left here
is the paintball game idea.
There, the idea is that the users can shoot
paintballs to advertisements, and once the ad
is fully covered in color splashes, it disappears.
On the right side you see the monster game idea,
where you have a virtual character, a monster,
that is eating ads.
And once you drag them over ads, or once you drag it
over ads, it eats the ads and the ad disappears.
And you can get some virtual items for your monster.
We also have a penguin game idea where you've got thirty
seconds to guide the penguin to fishes to collect points,
and then you need to try to not hit any ads on your way
to collecting points.
And once you've done that all ads disappear on the web page.
Then we have a Pacman game idea, where the idea is that
you have a Pacman and you can eat up the ads using
this Pacman, and try to avoid hitting the ghosts.
We also came up with a Tetris game idea, where you played
a Tetris game, so to say.
And once the row is cleared, the ad shrinks away
until it's fully gone.
We also got the (laughs) Minesweeper game idea,
where the ad was divided into a tile grid,
and clicking safe tiles
removes the ad, while mine tiles can be flagged.
And once you've found the mines, the ad disappears as well.
Also, we got the idea of using tokens, so this is
kind of a way around.
So here the ad is hidden by default.
Once you click it, you can collect tokens that can be
used to unlock, for example, news articles or
special content on the website.
And we've got also a rival teams idea, where two rival
teams who are competing over web pages can claim ads
and the current team that has the most ads claimed
gets a website which is shown without any ads.
And first of all, to make sure that our storyboards,
as we wanted to use them for upcoming studies,
are actually well understood, we did a storyboard
validation online study with twenty participants
where participants were simply asked to describe
what they can see on the storyboard.
"So please describe the game idea that is illustrated
in this storyboard.
"What's the tasks that users were given?"
And we had two independent raters that went through
these free text answers and had to rate them,
whether the participants really understood the game idea
or whether they did not understand the game idea.
And they could rate them from 1 to 3,
where 1 means they they did not understand the game
idea at all,
and 3 means they fully understood what we are trying
to say with the storyboard.
Overall, we got a mean score of 2.78,
which basically shows that most of the storyboards
were actually well understandable,
and that the two raters had a really high
interrater agreement of Cohen's Kappa of 0.94.
So overall, this shows that our storyboards
are well comprehensible.
We had some minor issues that we fixed,
but overall the storyboards actually explained
the intended concepts.
After that, we did another pre-study with fifty participants
to elicit requirements for implementation.
So of course, we just did not want to come up
with storyboards, but also implement some of them,
and to kind of inform which storyboards shall
be implemented, we did this pre-study to elicit
requirements and also to get a rating of the
perception of these game ideas from users.
So users had two tasks in this study.
The first task was to develop a game idea
which has the goal to improve the perception
of ads on a website.
And users could also then type their game ideas
in free text answer in our survey.
And then they saw all of our kind of game ideas
using the storyboards that we just validated,
and had to rate different items on five-point
Likert scales, like whether the game idea
would enhance the perception of ads,
whether they would like to play this game to deactivate ads,
whether this game would be fun to play,
and whether they would like the game idea.
So first of all, coming to the requirements,
here we did an inductive content analysis with two raters.
And we found four themes or requirements.
First of all, people described casual games,
so most game concepts were using very simple rules
and were easy to play.
We also found that entertainment should be more important
than effectiveness, which means that the main purpose
should be entertainment and not the promotion
of a brand or product.
They also should be unobtrusive, meaning
that no ad-specific events like redirecting to another
website should be triggered when playing the game.
And the play time should be short.
This means that games should not take long to complete.
And with this in mind we also had a look at which kinds
of game ideas were perceived significantly better
than the neutral choice on a five-point scale,
so significantly better than the value 3.
And we found that the Tetris game idea, the paintball
game idea, and the monster game idea were perceived
significantly better than the neutral choice,
which is why we decided to implement them
as the next step, and kind of test them
in a news website setting.
So here's your short video.
We created a dummy news website featuring different
articles and categories, and within each article
you have one ad.
And you now see the implementation of the Tetris game idea.
So you can press the Play button, and of course
you need to complete one row to make sure that it's
not too long, and then the ad disappears.
You also get the paintball game concept here.
You're shooting color splashes at the ad,
and once the ad is fully covered it disappears as well.
And last but not least, the monster game idea
where you track a monster sitting on your browser screen
over the ad.
The monster then eats the ad and gets a virtual item,
which can be put on the monster.
So of course we did a lab study then,
to investigate the effectiveness and user
enjoyment of this approach.
And as I said, we had this dummy news website,
and we created pictures of advertisements
for pictures, prints, and products.
And the study looked like this.
So this is the procedure.
Participants had to read the news article.
Then they had to deactivate ad in one of four groups,
like we had one control group where they just had to click
a close button.
We had the Tetris game idea, the paintball game idea,
and the monster game idea.
And basically, they had to repeat this for three articles.
So our users were reading news articles
and deactivating ads three times,
and had to answer some comprehension questions
about the article that they just read.
Afterwards, we measured the user experience using
intrinsic motivational interviewing
and a user experience questionnaire.
And then brand and product recall and recognition
tests followed to investigate the effectiveness
of our approach in terms of brand and product
recall and recognition.
And then we had a fake task.
So here, we said "Okay, now we've got another
"news article for you, and you're now free
"to choose whether you want to use an ad blocker,
"or whether you want to stick
"to your current configuration."
And we did that in order to kind of get a feeling
whether the participants liked the game idea,
or whether they want to use a usual ad blocker.
Of course, there was no fourth article,
so we then said, "We just wanted to know
"what kind of decision you would make."
We had the following hypotheses.
First of all, we thought that playfully deactivating
ads is more enjoyable.
That less participants prefer using an ad blocker
in the gamified conditions.
And that brand and product recall or recognition
should be higher in gamified conditions.
We had more hypotheses and more dependent variables.
You can find them in the paper.
I will focus on these, because I think these
are the most interesting ones.
So first of all, coming to the first hypothesis,
whether playfully deactivating ads is more enjoyable,
we found that in a baseline condition participants
rated or gave the score of 9.0 on average
on the IMI Enjoyment Subscale,
where it was significantly increased in the Tetris,
in the paintball, as well as in the monster game concept.
Showing that actually all the game ideas provided
significantly more enjoyable user experiences
than the control group.
Then looking at whether less participants would prefer
using an ad blocker in the gamified conditions,
this relates to this fake task that I just talked about.
So in the control group, 83% of users would like
to use an ad blocker for the last task,
instead of clicking the close button.
In the Tetris game idea, 67% of users wanted
to use an ad blocker.
In the paintball game idea, 89% of users wanted
to use an ad blocker.
But now (laughs) in the monster game idea, only 33%
wanted to use an ad blocker, which means
that 67% of users actually wanted to stick to this
monster game idea, and keep on eating ads with the monster.
So this hypothesis is supported only
for the monster condition.
Then we're looking at the effectiveness
of the brand recall.
In the control group, participants were not able
to recall any brand.
So no brands were recalled at all (laughs).
In the Tetris game idea, 0.28 brands were recalled
on average, out of three.
In the paintball game idea, only 0.06.
And in the monster, 0.11.
So we only found a significant effect
for the Tetris game idea.
Coming to brand recognition, we see that on average,
participants recognized 1.28 brands out of three
that they were shown.
And this significantly increased, basically,
for all game concepts.
So in the Tetris, paintball,
and in the monster game concept,
this value significantly increased,
supporting the hypothesis for all game concepts
that we had.
Coming to product recognition, here we see that on average
people were able to recognize 2.28 out of three
products in the baseline,
and this significantly increased to 2.72
in the Tetris game idea,
but no effects could have been found
for the other two ideas or conditions.
So, coming to limitations and future work.
First of all, we did a lab study,
which should be considered.
So we need to conduct in-the-wild studies,
for example by developing a browser extension,
which is what we're currently doing.
So if you had a look at our poster,
you see the current progress that we've made
in the prototype of developing a ad blocker
for the Chrome web browser.
Also deducing design guidelines for gamified ads
would be worthwhile to consider.
As well as conducting qualitative research
to learn more about reasons for the effects
that we found,
and how to integrate such an approach
in the daily life of users.
To conclude, we created game ideas
for playfully deactivating ads,
and created storyboards for them.
We validated those storyboards in a first online study
with twenty participants.
We did a perception study with fifty participants
to kind of select which game areas should be implemented.
And we did a lab-based study with seventy-two participants
where we were actually able to show
that there are benefits in terms of enjoyment
as well as brand and product recall and recognition.
So with this, I would like to conclude.
And if you have any questions, I'm happy to take them.
(audience applauding)
- [Woman] So, questions for Max?
Otherwise, oh, okay.
- [Audience Member] Or maybe just quickly if you don't
mind I'm gonna jump up here.
- Okay.
- [Audience Member] So I was quite curious about
the different findings in terms of brand recall,
brand recognition, product recognition.
How do you explain those different effects?
- So I think of course, the most hardest thing
is of course brand recall.
Because we had brands that nobody knew,
so we made up those brands,
so it's not quite surprising
that nobody could really recall brands.
But I think the significant effects that we found
could be explained by the interaction
that you have with the ad.
So if you interact with the ad, of course,
and you do this when you play games on them,
then of course I could imagine that this explains
why people had significantly more recall or recognition
when interacting with them.
So I think this is one main cause for these effects, yeah.
- [Audience Member] Nice.
- [Audience Member] Hello, my name's Abraham
from the University of Michigan.
Thank you for the talk.
I was wondering, because it seemed in your study it was
basically like news, ad, and then ad
that took up full screen,
or ad that took up most of the attention.
And I'm wondering how you viewed this gamification
in ads that are sort of banner ads,
or that are on the side of news articles
or that aren't necessarily blocking the content
before you can access it.
- So in our study we used a banner ads.
These are actually still the most popular
kinds of advertisements.
But of course there are different ad formats
that need to be considered.
We just focused on banner ads.
They were not really intrusive,
so we did not really have popups or something.
It would be interesting to see
how our approach actually works then.
So in this prototype that we just implemented in this
ad blocker for the Chrome browser,
we were actually also able to handle popups
and to just drag the monster.
So we decided to go for the monster game concept,
as this was the only one that was preferred
over using an ad blocker, actually, as you can see here.
And yeah, so here we are actually able to deal
with different formats, but we still struggle,
for example, with ads that are embedded into videos
and all these kinds of things.
So this still needs some more work, yeah.
- [Audience Member] Sergio Omanuzi, UC Berkeley.
It's an interesting talk,
but I guess one question I have is,
without instructing participants in the wild
that the ads are interactive,
don't you expect that they might be, people might be
apprehensive to click on them for fear of having
a new browser window pop open or, you know,
the various privacy implications?
- Yeah.
So for this implementation for our ad blocker,
we now have a kind of a small monster icon
on all ads that we detected.
So we are basically building upon the most popular
ad blocker, Adblock Plus extension.
And we identify ads on the website,
and we highlight those ads that can be interacted with
with a small icon.
And as people get used to this interaction,
they know that nothing bad is gonna happen,
because we won't kind of trigger any events
on this ad when you drag your monster over the ad.
So it's not like any ad-specific events or something
is triggered when you drag the monster over the ad.
- [Woman] Okay, so we have time for one more question.
- [Audience Member] Otherwise, I have
a followup question (laughs) to my previous question.
So I'm quite struck that overall in terms of recall
and recognition, Tetris does the best.
- Yeah.
So as I said, I think it could be explainable
with this interaction.
I think one kind of drawback of the paintball game idea,
for example, is that you shoot onto the ad,
which of course causes that you don't
see the ad anymore (laughs).
So it's not so surprising that we don't
find many effects here.
But on the Tetris game idea, it takes you quite some time
that you have to look at.
So I think it's the longest interaction in a way,
and therefore I think users kind of watch very
long onto the ad, and then maybe can recall
and recognize brands and products better
than with the other two concepts,
where it's pretty fast.
On the monster game idea, you also drag the monster
over the ad, and it's gone in like three seconds or so.
So I think this is explainable by the higher amount
of interaction, the higher time of interaction.
- [Woman] Right.
Well, excellent.
Thank you so much.
- Yes, thank you so much.
- [Woman] Please give Max another hand.
(audience applauding)