Gamified Ads: Bridging the Gap Between User Enjoyment and the Effectiveness of Online Ads

Often, online ads are disruptive and annoying. As a consequence, ad blockers are used to prevent ads from appearing on a website. However, web service providers lose more than 35 billion dollars per year because of this development. As an alternative, we investigate the user enjoyment and the advertising effectiveness of playfully deactivating online ads. This video showcase illustrates the research method and the most interesting results of our previous research. Here, we assessed the perception of eight game concepts allowing users to playfully deactivate ads and implemented three well-perceived ones. These were found to be more enjoyable than deactivating ads without game elements, with one game concept being even preferred over using an ad blocker. We also found positive effects on ad effectiveness as compared to the baseline.