Media & Mass Communication, Volume 2, 2013

Abstract: In view of conveying advertising messages, structural linking, immersion and flow are key words to describe the potential of computer games. The high involvement of players, however, seems to be rather hindering to intensive examination of advertising messages, which are unobtrusively placed in the game scene. This so called InGame-Advertising (IGA) is often processed with little attention or not consciously at all. Therefore it is sometimes not remembered. Nevertheless, incidental processing of IGA does not mean ineffectiveness: Repetition of brand and product placements increase perceptual fluency which as a competence is positively experienced, but cannot be attributed to the cause (i.e. repetition) if processing of these stimuli remains unconscious. Instead, this positive experience is misattributed to the brands and products placed in the game. If consciously collected, a concurrently running conceptual process is overlying the prime interpretation of perceptual fluency; if negative thoughts are developed in this conscious control process, the assessment of brands and products turns out to be rather unfavorable, contrary to the misattribution of positively experienced fluency. This paper discusses the effectiveness of IGA from the perspective of perceptual fluency and conceptual control processes together with two individual characteristics (involvement, susceptibility to interpersonal influence) based on an experimental study of the game ‘ORF-Ski Challenge 2006’.