Brand Awareness and Attitudes Towards Political Advertisements in Sport Video Games

Due to the growth of the video game industry, the practice of in-game advertising, and the desirable game player demographics, then U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama placed early voting advertisements in a series of online sport video games during his 2008 presidential campaign. The purpose of this study was to examine the awareness of these political ads and the attitudes towards the ads when compared to advertisements featuring corporate brands. The results suggest there were higher levels of awareness for the political themed advertisements while attitude enhancement was more likely to occur for advertisements which featured corporate brands.