4 - Player Engagement, In-Game Advertising, Neuromarketing and User Experience

by Lennart Nacke

Today, our advent cal­en­dar leads us to a highly inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tion from the inno­v­a­tive com­pany otoin­sights (a One to One Interactive com­pany), who has Jeffrey and Shaowen Bardzell as aca­d­e­mic advis­ers. In-game adver­tis­ing is already a highly inter­est­ing sub­ject by itself that will gen­er­ate more inter­est in the com­ing years, but also thrilling is the research method­ol­ogy of otoin­sights, since they attempt to mea­sure engage­ment with a research lab called Quantemo. Quantemo seems to col­lect all the “good stuff” for quan­ti­ta­tive, psy­chophys­i­o­log­i­cal research:

  • Real-Time Eye Tracking
  • Heart Rate
  • Respiratory Rate
  • Galvanic Skin Response
  • Facial Recognition
  • EEG Brain Activity (Electroencephalography)

The field of study that uses such mea­sures to inves­ti­gate mar­ket­ing is called neu­ro­mar­ket­ing, accord­ing to otoin­sights “a field of mar­ket­ing that stud­ies con­sumers’ sen­so­ri­mo­tor, cog­ni­tive, and affec­tive responses to mar­ket­ing stim­uli.” While I remain skep­tic (as I did with EmSense) of the “quan­temo phys­i­o­log­i­cal index = heart rate + res­pi­ra­tory rate + gal­vanic skin response” and the “quan­temo algo­rithm, which dynam­i­cally weights each mea­sure accord­ing to the par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion,” I do appre­ci­ate a com­pany that embraces this field of study with such fas­ci­na­tion. The study pre­sented here is very com­pelling and the use of eye track­ing is even more excit­ing (the only down­side being that par­tic­i­pants only watched game clips and did not play the actual games; the SVEETER eye track­ing tool might actu­ally hold the solu­tion for such real-time game inter­ac­tion while record­ing eye track­ing data). So with­out fur­ther ado, please have a look at the presentation.




More links to the study and other pre­sen­ta­tions from otoinsights:

Two Bonus videos

Meta Game Advertisement: World of Warcraft and Toyota


“If It Feels Good Do It” : Using Neuromarketing to Go Beyond Click-Through: the Emerging Understanding of the Links Between Biometric Measures and Consumer Response to Media
Google Tech Talk by André Marquis of Innerscope Research

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