AdVRtize: The Effect of Immersion, Visual Angle, and Interactivity on the Effectiveness of Product Placements

Closed Human-Computer Interaction Master Project No Affiliation

1. Motivation

What is the future of product placement in virtual reality (VR) media? It stands to reason that VR will, sooner or later, become a mainstream media. And with that comes all the baggage that we experience in current media right now, such as product placements. The goal of this project is to find out how typical VR factors such as immersion, visual angle and interactivity influence the effectiveness of product placements.

Product or brand placement itself can be defined as ”a marketing practice in advertising and promotion wherein a brand name, product, package, signage, or other trademark merchandise is inserted into and used contextually in a motion picture, television, or other media vehicle for commercial purposes” [1]. The effectiveness of these placements is often measured through recall and recognition for the displayed brands or products [2]. Research found that memory for brands was higher in 3D content compared to 2D content [3]. Embedding placements in virtual environments was previously described as “promising”[4]. Higher interactivity also leads to better recall and recognition of interactive content [5].

Immersive VR allows direct interaction and a close-up on virtual objects. Immersion is ”the extent to which the computer displays are capable of delivering an inclusive, extensive, surrounding, and vivid illusion of reality to the senses of a human participant” [6]. This enables a high visual angle on specific stimuli, such as a brand or product in immersive VR. As a higher visual angle also increases emotional responses to audiovisual stimuli [11]. These characteristics might inherently lead to a higher effectiveness of product placements in VR.

However, it remains unclear if and how the three factors of immersion, visual angle and interactivity influence the effectiveness of product placements. A study looking into these 3 factors individually is necessary.

Related Work

Product placement has become a widespread technique not only because it is effective, but also because it can enhance the realism of media [7]. It allows marketeers to place their brands in a certain context or to display them with characters that have traits desired by the target audience.

A typical way to measure product placement effectiveness it the memory consumers have for displayed products [2].

Interactivity is defined as “the extent to which users can participate in modelling the form and content of a mediated environment in real time” [8]. In general, higher interactivity results in better recall and recognition of interactive contents [5]. It also leads to better results in memory tests[9]. This indicates a higher effectiveness for interactive product placements.

There has been previous research on the effects of presence and immersion on memory and product placement effectiveness. Presence has a positive effect on learning outcome [10] and task performance [11]. However, higher presence was also found to decrease the memory for fictional brands in a VR jump and run game [12]. As to immersion, research shows that participants in a study could better recall the position of items in a VE [13] and could better remember completed tasks when using VR instead of a desktop 3D application [15]. Even so, recall of brands was lower after watching a 3D movie compared to a 2D movie [14].

This lets the effects of immersion, visual angle and interactivity on real brands in VR remain inconclusive.

Method

To individually assert the effects of interactivity, immersion and visual angle, four versions of a puzzle game were developed. The four versions were high immersion VR (IVR), high immersion VR with a reduced field of view of 45° (VR low FOV) low immersion desktop and a fourth version in which the desktop condition was remodelled in VR. This makes the fourth condition highly immersive but keeps the angle on the stimulus the same as in the desktop condition.

All versions of the puzzle game use the Vive Pro and its controllers. This means that the interaction method between the four conditions remains the same.

The brand placements could either appear as interactive puzzle elements or as non-interactive posters in the background. Both puzzle and poster had the same apparent size.

The puzzle game consists of a blue semi-translucent box and nine small cubes beneath it. Each of these small cubes shows a ninth of a bigger image. This image could either be a brand or not. Assembling the nine cubes in the box to display the image would solve the puzzle. If the puzzle is solved correctly, the box turns green and the next puzzle begins after two seconds. On incorrect assembly, the box turns red and the user can rearrange the cubes until they are in the correct place. The brands were drawn out of a pool of 14 brand images. A previous survey in advance of this study ranked all the brands as well-known. The non-brand images were all selected to be colourful with distinct patterns in them, so that they were usable as puzzle. We developed our system with Unity in the version 2019.3.8 [15] and used the SteamVR Plugin in the version 2.6.1 [16].

Hypotheses

Based on the related work, 3 hypotheses emerge:

H1: “A higher immersion increases the number of correctly recalled and recognized brand placements.”
H2: “A higher visual angle increases the number of correctly recalled and recognized brand placements.”
H3: “Correct recall and recognition for brand placements is higher for interactive brand placements compared to noninteractive ones.”

To test these hypotheses, we conduct a user study.

Study

The procedure of the study is as follows:

1. Participant consent declaration and participant information
   
2. Pre-Questionnaires
   
3. Tutorial
   
4. Solving of 10 puzzles
   
5. Post-Questionnaires
   
6. Participant information about the purpose of this study
   

The following questionnaires are used:

• Simulator Sickness Questionnaire [17]
  
• Raw Nasa Task Load Index [18]
  
• System Usability Scale [19]
  
• iGroup Presence Questionnaire [20]
  

Additionally, participants had to list all brands they could remember to measure free recall. After this, we gave them a list with brands and they had to indicate which of them appeared in the game to measure recognition.

References

[1] K. Williams, A. Petrosky, E. Hernandez, and R. Page. Journal of Management and Marketing Research Product placement effectiveness. pp. 1–24, 2011.

[2] B. G. Pitts and J. Slattery. An examination of the effects of time on sponsorship awareness levels. Sport Marketing Quarterly, 13(1):43–54,2004.

[3] R. Terlutter, S. Diehl, I. Koinig, and M. K. Waiguny. Positive or negative effects of technology enhancement for brand placements?memory of brand placements in 2d, 3d, and 4d movies. Media Psychology, 19(4):505–533, 2016.

[4] T.-W. Lui, G. Piccoli, and B. Ives. Marketing strategies in virtualworlds. ACM SIGMIS Database, 38(4):77, oct 2007. doi: 10.1145/1314234.1314248

[5] Q. Xu and S. S. Sundar. Interactivity and memory: Information processing of interactive versus non interactive content. Computers in Human Behavior,63:620–629, 2016. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.046

[6] M. Slater and S. Wilbur. A framework for immersive virtual environments (five): Speculations on the role of presence in virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 6(6):603–616, 1997.

[7] D. Gall and M. E. Latoschik. Visual angle modulates affective responses to audiovisual stimuli. Computers in Human Behavior, 109:106346, 2020.

[8] R. J. Avery and R. Ferraro. Verisimilitude or advertising? brand appearances on prime-time television. Journal of Consumer Affairs, 34(2):217–244, 2000.

[9] J. Steuer. Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence. Journal of Communication, 42(4):73–93, 1992. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1992.tb00812.x

[10] H. Hang and S. Auty. Children playing branded video games: The impact of interactivity on product placement effectiveness. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21(1):65–72, 2011. doi: 10.1016/j.jcps.2010.09.004

[11] A. Dengel. E ects of Immersion and Presence on Learning Outcomes in Immersive Educational Virtual Environments for Computer Science Education. (March), 2020.

[12] J. A. Stevens and J. P. Kincaid. The relationship between presence and performance in virtual simulation training. Open Journal of Modelling and Simulation, 3:41–48, 2015. doi: 10.4236/ojmsi.2015.32005

[13] J. Roettl and R. Terlutter. The same video game in 2D, 3D or virtual reality – How does technology impact game evaluation and brand placements? PLoS ONE, 13(7):1–24, 2018. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200724

[14] E. Krokos, C. Plaisant, and A. Varshney. Virtual memory palaces: immersion aids recall. Virtual Reality, 23(1):1–15, 2019. doi: 10.1007/s10055-018-0346-3

[15] J. Harman, R. Brown, and D. Johnson. The role of immersion during situated memory recall within virtual worlds. Proceedings of the 28th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, OzCHI 2016, pp.1–10, 2016. doi: 10.1145/3010915.3010945

[16] Unity Technologies. Unity 2019.3.8. 2019.

[17] Valve Corporation. Steamvr plugin 2.6.1. 2020.

[18] R. S. Kennedy, N. E. Lane, K. S. Berbaum, and M. G. Lilienthal. Simulator Sickness Questionnaire: An Enhanced Method for Quantifying Simulator Sickness. The International Journal of Aviation Psychology, 3(3):203–220, jul 1993. doi: 10.1207/s15327108ijap0303 3

[16] S. G. Hart. Nasa-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX); 20 Years Later. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 50(9):904–908, 2006. doi: 10.1177154193120605000909

[19] J. Brooke. Sus: a “quick and dirty’usability. Usability evaluation in industry, p. 189, 1996.

[20] T. Schubert, F. Friedmann, and H. Regenbrecht. The experience of presence: Factor analytic insights. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 10(3):266–281, 2001.

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg