Implicit Measurement Games: Using Casual Games to Measure Psychological Responses to Ads

Internet advertising has become big business. Online advertising revenues were estimated at $23 billion for the U.S. market alone in 2008 (IAB 2009). Whether or not advertisers’ money is spent effectively is hard to determine (Dreze and Hussherr 2003). Although click-through or conversion rates may give some indication of an ad’s impact on Internet users’ behaviour, these measures provide little information with respect to the psychological impact of online marketing, such as changing awareness, attitudes or beliefs with respect to the advertised product or brand (Chatterjee, Hoffman and Novak 2003). To obtain such psychological insights, online consumer-based research is warranted. The conventional methods used for such research, however, have several disadvantages. In this paper we present and test a new method for conducting online consumer research that circumvents these disadvantages: Implicit Measurement Games (IMGs). The implicit nature of the measurement method aims to avoid reactance (i.e. social desirability) and demand artefacts in respondents by tapping into their unconscious cognitions. Moreover, by presenting implicit measurement instruments as games we aim to make them more attractive and thus circumvent the problem of response bias. In a study, we test Implicit Measurement Games as a new way of tapping into consumers psychological states online, and compare it against more conventional methods of online measurement.