Experimental studies of advertising message effectiveness in virtual reality

Abstract

One of the most important elements of advertising campaigns is their message. Many factors can influence message effectiveness, inter alia, the content, the form, the carrier, or the location of the advertisement. Together, these aspects can determine how visible the advertising message is to the audience. At the campaign-planning stage, it is usually hard to tell how the advertisement should be presented and properly exposed so that the recipients perceive and remember it. We propose performing the pre-test of advertisements with the use of a virtual reality system that provides the environment close to the natural conditions and using cognitive neuroscience tools to record the objective measures of the audience’s opinions. Our proposal shows the procedure for designing and conducting an experiment that allows for an assessment of the advertising message effectiveness based on its visibility. The article also presents the preliminary results of a pilot experiment that was designed to test both the virtual reality system and the proposed procedure.