Identifying the success factors of advergames: a mixed-method approach

Purpose – Advergame as a new approach in advertising has recently attracted the attention of many researchers and practitioners. Despite the growing investment, managers still do not have a comprehensive understanding of the success factors of advergames. To the authors ’ knowledge, there are no studies that address success factors in advergames. The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively explore the success factors of advergames to enhance the markets ’ insight regarding the implementation of advergames. Design/methodology/approach – This study investigates the success factors of advergames implementation using the mixed-method approach. For this purpose, along with a literature review, some semistructured interviews with experts were conducted and the obtained data were analyzed using the thematicanalysis.Thenasurveywasconductedtovalidatetheextractedfactorsandcriteria.ThequantitativedatawereanalyzedbyStudent t -test and factor analysis. Findings – Theresultsindicatedthatthemainsuccessfactorsofadvergamesaregamedesignfactors,brand/ product-related factors, players ’ personality-related factors and technical factors. The rank orders of the mentioned factors and their subcriteria were identified using their respective variance. Practical implications – In advergame initiatives, technical issues must be considered along with game design factors, brand/product-related factors and players ’ personality-related factors simultaneously. The findings can assist managers to understand all aspects of advergames adaptation and assess the weaknesses and strengths of adervgame projects. Originality/value – Although the intersection between digital games and advertising has had a growing trendin bothpracticalandacademiccontexts,therearefewstudiesonwhatfactorsmustbeconsideredduring advergames development and implementation. The main contribution of this study is to explore the important aspects of advergames success and their priorities. The findings provide a comprehensive insight on the interdisciplinary aspects of advergames.


Introduction
Although a plethora of traditional ways of advertisement still exists, yet businesses have moved toward taking advantage of modern methods and platforms of advertising (Radesky et al., 2020). Studies show that the relative inefficiency of traditional advertising methods (Choi et al., 2015), the high cost of traditional methods (Hernandez and Minor., 2011) and their limitations in terms of location and scope of users (An et al., 2014) have nowadays made the marketers look for alternative and complementary methods for effective advertising (Catal an et al., 2019;Van Reijmersdal et al., 2015). One of the newest marketing strategies that has attracted growing interest and emerged as a dynamic mass medium for marketers is advergames (Lee and Cho, 2017;Folkvord and Van't Riet, 2018). While different forms of advertising such as newspaper ads and banners can be easily forgotten by customers, advergames can engage for a long time (Cheung et al., 2015;Catal an et al., 2019;Roettl et al., 2016). Although playing computer games was formerly regarded as one of the teenagers' hobbies, these games nowadays have become one of the main hobbies of a wide range of audiences with different demographic characteristics (Choi, 2019) to the extent that Identifying the success factors of advergames researchers believe that marketing activities will encounter new challenges to meet the needs and desires of this generation (Bellman et al., 2014). Because of their intrinsic attractiveness and interactive nature, computer games are popular among the various groups of people around the world. This has led the marketers to use these games as a promotional tool (Sung and Lee, 2020). According to eMarketer (2019), spending on advertising in all games grew by 16% in 2019 and will continue to grow by double-digit rates in the coming years. Advertising games are powerful tools for building brand loyalty and collecting vital data about potential and existing customers (Redondo, 2012). Investing in the field of advergames is the thirdlargest investment budget (about 12% of online advertising funds) on the Internet (Far ıas, 2018). The rapid growth of interest in advergames indicates that marketers recognize their potential advantages for interaction and reaching target customers (Catal an et al., 2019;Radesky et al., 2020). Despite huge investments in this area, many commercial digital game projects have failed to reach promised outcomes (Aleem et al., 2016). According to the Gartner Institute, about 70% of the world's largest companies have used gamification; however, just near half of them have achieved their predetermined goals (Robson et al., 2015). Many of failures in advergame and digital game strategies in businesses were due to lack of knowledge and understanding of gamification, unfamiliarity with how to implement, lack of awareness about the users' interest and the ways of attracting them (Robson et al., 2015), poor business strategies (Aleem et al., 2016) and lack of proper understanding of the vital factors in designing and implementing these new initiatives (Heilbrunn et al., 2017).
In recent years, various studies have been conducted in the advergame field. For instance, Lee and Cho (2017) explored the determinants of consumers' intention to play an advergame and purchase a product by considering advergame personality and company attributes. Roettl et al. (2016) identified the persuasive mechanisms of advergames and analyzed how they were applied in advergames. They used 195 samples of advergames to recognize and categorize their persuasive mechanisms. Likewise, Wanick et al. (2018) examined the relationship between advergame design, advergame experience and consumer behavior across cultures. According to Cicchirillo (2019), research works in the field of advergame, while robust, have some shortcomings; hence, new research is necessary to better understand gamification approach. Digital game development is an interdisciplinary concept that requires considering the principles of software engineering, business, management and artistic disciplines (Aleem et al., 2016). The literature on advergames is fragmented and focused on isolated issues. The majority of previous studies have explored the determinants of consumers' attitudes, engagement and intention to play. They have just analyzed consumer behavior issues quantitatively. However, no studies that identify the success factors of advergames have been reported in the literature. The main objective of this study is to explore comprehensively the critical success factors of advergames and provide an understanding of the best practices and guidelines of advergames implementation for marketers.
2. Theoretical background 2.1 Gamification Nowadays, with the development of gamification technology, the boundary between gaming and business activities has become increasingly blurred (Xi and Hamari, 2020). Gamification is a new approach that utilizes capabilities, techniques and theories of the game in areas that are, generally, unrelated to the game, including marketing, human resource, learning and so on (Morschheuser et al., 2019). The use of game elements in nongame contexts is the most commonly used definition of gamification (Deterding et al., 2011). Gamification offers the conditions (chances of winning or receiving rewards) to increase the users' motivation to perform an activity. Comprehensive support for emotions and providing context for different experiences (Xi and Hamari, 2020), stimulating intrinsic motivation of users (Unsal et al., 2018), enhancing user satisfaction (Morschheuser et al., 2019) and conveying a sense of optimism (Makanawala et al., 2013) are the most important benefits of applying gamification. Considering all the benefits and the importance of the new approach of gamification in marketing, investment in advergames is increasing such that spending in this field is predicted to increase from $4.91bn in 2016 to nearly $12bn in 2021 (Statista, 2019). Due to the growing interest in gamification, e-marketers have been motived to apply the gamification approach in the marketing domain to enhance the effectiveness of marketing (Hofacker et al., 2016). As a new approach, gamification provides businesses and marketers with an opportunity for entertaining and engaging customers (Xu et al., 2016).

Advergames
Advergame is a combination of two concepts, advertising and video games. It refers to sending advertising messages through digital games (Catal an et al., 2019). Digital games designed to promote a specific product or brand are named advertising games (Çadırcı and Gungor, 2019). Advergames include the placement of messages, logos and business figures into games (Culp et al., 2010). Advertising games are something between entertainment and persuasion (Gross, 2010). Roettl et al. (2016) defined advergame as a downloadable game with the primary objectives of transmitting advertising messages, building traffic to websites and creating brand awareness. The purpose of advertising games is to promote the players' emotional relationship between the game and the brand specified in the game (Dahl et al., 2009). Compared to traditional advertisements, advertising games have a dynamic and interactive nature (Mackay et al., 2009;Chu, 2018;Vashisht, 2019). Digital games are less expensive and more comprehensible compared to traditional media (Vashisht and Mohan, 2018). Some benefits of advergames strategy are enhancing user engagement (Redondo, 2012), brand integration (Catal an et al., 2019), an increase in sales volume (Hudson and Hudson, 2006), boosting the impact of advertising (Noorbehbahani et al., 2019) and mutual communication (Catal an et al., 2019). Advergames usually seek to provide information about a brand, introduce it to players and create a positive attitude by improving the brand image in the mind of audience (Hofmeister-T oth and Nagy, 2011). There are many types of advergames. For instance, Lee and Cho (2017) considered 13 categories of advergames, including action, adventure, quiz, fighting, puzzle, racing, role-playing, shooting, simulation, sports, strategy, card game and arcade. The types of advergames must be suitable for the types of promoted product categories. Advergames often are not developed independently; rather they are developed during a contract between a brand and advergame vendors (Hartini, 2020). The advergame literature has attracted growing interest among researchers and academics and many studies have been conducted in this field so far. Noorbehbahani et al. (2019) systematically reviewed the literature related to the application of gamification in e-marketing and identified ten main research areas, namely defining gamification from a service marketing perspective, gamification of advertising, gamification mechanisms in marketing, gamification and brand cocreation experiences, gamification in tourism marketing, gamification on the intention of engagement and brand attitude, measuring user game experience, the relationship between game, marketing and interactive brand design, gamification design in mobile marketing and gamified interface in marketing websites. Despite a growing number of studies on advergames, the success factors of advergames, which will be discussed in the next section, have not received as much attention as they need.

Success factors of advergames
After examining the theoretical sources relevant to the topic of advergame success factors, some of the main findings are summarized in Table 1.

Identifying the success factors of advergames
The brief points obtained from the literature review could be summarized as follows: (1) As many studies have pointed to the importance of advergames as a new marketing strategy (Catal an et al., 2019), the implementation of advergame is a great challenge and a decision-making method is required to assist the users in service selection.

Researcher (S) Title Key results
Catal an et al.
Analyzing mobile advergaming effectiveness: the role of flow, game repetition and brand familiarity The research findings showed that independent variables (i.e. game repetition and familiarity with the brand name) significantly affect the dependent variables, namely players' brand attitude and their purchasing goals Vora and Jayswal (2018) Demographic factors influencing brand equity in the context of advergame The results showed that demographic characteristics such as age, education and occupation influence brand equity. So these factors should be taken into account when designing advertising games Wanick et al. (2018) Can visual familiarity influence attitudes toward brands? An exploratory study of advergame design and cross-cultural consumer behavior This study has been conducted in a Brazilian society and a British society among a group of advertising game players. The Brazilians had a more favorable attitude toward the brand because of their familiarity with audiovisual features of the games. The results showed that audiovisual familiarity influences brand attitude. Paying attention to the proper design of advertising games is one of the factors affecting advertising games Gurney and Payne (2016) Parody as a brand: the case of [adult swim]'s paracasual advergames This study evaluates how advertising games are used by adults. Demographic characteristics have been identified as the success factors of advertising games Mart ı-Parreño et al. (2013) Factors contributing to brand attitude in advergames: entertainment and irritation This study provides new insights into the brand features in the context of advertising games. Brand characteristics and paying attention to the entertainment and advertising dimensions simultaneously in advertising games are identified as success factors of such games in this study Çeltek (2010) Mobile advergames in tourism marketing The study focuses on mobile advertising games in the tourism industry through SWOT analysis. The results showed that mobile advertising games are the most important new advertising tools in which viral marketing must be considered for their effectiveness to be successful Hudson and Hudson (2006) Branded entertainment: a new advertising technique or product placement in disguise?
The results of this study provide a conceptual framework for understanding various ways of product placement in advertising processes. The most important success factors in the strategy of advertising games include brand features, supporting the advertising activities, characteristics of the target population, evaluability, ethical issues and control Table 1. Some studies related to advergame success (2) Most studies in the field of advertising games have used a quantitative approach and examined the impact of advertising game features on brand attitudes (Catal an et al., 2019). From a methodological point of view, the qualitative approach has been used in a few studies in the field of advergames.
(3) Among the main areas investigated by advergame researchers, the influence of gamification on improving the customers' positive attitude toward brand and cocreating value has been emphasized (Noorbehbahani et al., 2019).
Currently, based on the authors' knowledge, there is no comprehensive framework including the multidimensional aspects of advergames, as well as integrating the technical, business and design aspects regarding advergame adaptation. Therefore, this paper is aimed to fill this theoretical gap by exploring the success factors of advergame using the mixed-method approach to better understand the various aspects of advergame implementation.

Research procedure
Advertising games are among the new marketing strategies. Identifying and understanding the critical success factors are essential for a successful implementation of advertising games; the main research question, therefore, is "What the critical success factors in advertising games are?" Due to the exploratory nature of the research, a mixed-method approach was used to answer the main research question.
In the first step, along with a comprehensive review of the literature, expert interviews were carried out by using a qualitative approach. To identify success factors of advergames, 13 semistructured interviews with experts were conducted to enrich success factors and best practices of advergames. The main interview question that the participants were asked was: "What success factors and best practices of advergames are?" Some other interview questions were: "What technical factors lead to the success of advertising?" and "From the customers' point of view, what makes advergame acceptable and influential?" After the agreement of interviewees to participate in the study, the interview protocol was sent to give them insight into the research aims and questions. During the interviews, all conversations were recorded with the permission of interviewees to document them carefully by the authors. The thematic analysis method was used to analyze the interview data. This method of qualitative data analysis is roughly the most favored approach for data analysis in social sciences (Roulston, 2001).
In the second step, using a quantitative approach, a questionnaire was developed and distributed among the experts to survey their opinions regarding the extracted factors and criteria. The questionnaire was based on the Likert scale from very disagree (1) to very agree (5).

Reliability and validity
First, to test the validity of the interview questions, the initial interview questions were evaluated and enriched by three academic experts. Next, pretest interviews were conducted that resulted in the content and writing editing of the interview questions. To assess the interview reliability, the intercoder reliability was used. For this purpose, the research assistant coded the three interviews randomly selected from all interviews, and the results indicated a substantial interrater agreement (Cohen Kappa 5 0.82), which was higher than the acceptable value of 0.6 (Steinar, 1996). In the second step, the questionnaire was prepared based on the extracted factors and criteria from the qualitative method (first step). To evaluate the validity of the questionnaire, content validity was applied and the initial design Identifying the success factors of advergames of the questionnaire was submitted to five academic experts of the research domain, including digital marketing experts and game designers. Some revisions were made according to the experts' suggestions, and the final questionnaire was confirmed after making the corrections. To assess the reliability of the questionnaire, Cronbach's alpha method was used. For this purpose, an initial sample consisting of 20 questionnaires was pretested and the reliability of each construct exceeded 0.7, which is above the conventional acceptable level of 0.7 (Sekaran and Bougie, 2016). Cronbach's α values of the factors are shown in Table 5. The factor analysis method was used to assess internal consistency and convergent validity. To assure the appropriateness of sample for conducting factor analysis, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlett's test of sphericity were employed. The KMO of sampling adequacy value (0.766) and Bartlett's test of sphericity (p < 0.001) indicated that the factor analysis was suitable for this set of data and the correlation matrix was meritorious (see Table 5).

Research sample and method of analysis
The research population was a combination of academics and experienced professionals in digital marketing and game designers, who were selected from business colleges and large advertising firms (i.e. faculty members who were from the marketing and e-commerce sciences in universities, digital marketing managers, game programmers and game designer professionals). The sampling method used in this step was purposive (judgmental), and all participants had at least eight years of experience in online advertising and advergames domain. Overall, 13 interviews were held to reach the saturation point of interviews. Marshall et al. (2013) asserted that the most used sample size for an interview is 10-12 persons in IS research. Each interview lasted about 90 min, and all interviews were conducted during three weeks.
Then, for the survey method, the experts were asked to evaluate the extracted factors and criteria. All participants had at least five years of experience in the field of digital marketing and game application development. In total, 120 questionnaires were sent to the respondents through various communication channels, including e-mail, Telegram and LinkedIn, or in person. After repeated follow-ups, 78 questionnaires were collected over eight weeks. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data, and t-test and factor analysis method were used to evaluate the quantitative data obtained from the survey.

Profile of the research participants
Eight computer game designers and programmers, who were experienced in developing advergames games, and five digital marketing experts participated in the semistructured interviews. Among them, three were women and ten were men. Nine interviewees (about 69%) had a PhD degree, and four of them (about 31%) had a Master of Science in the related fields of research.

Thematic analysis results
As mentioned in the Methodology section, this study was conducted in two steps. Here, we discuss the findings of each step separately.
Step 1. In this step, critical success factors and criteria of advergames were extracted from the literature in advergame and gamification as well as semistructured interviews with experts. After each interview, the recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and documented. The interviews' contents were analyzed using thematic analysis; then they were classified. Examples of codes and illustrative quotes extracted from the interviews are presented in Table 2.
After extracting the codes from the interviews' content, they were classified as success factors of advergames based on their similarities. Table 3 indicates all the success factors and their indicators obtained from the literature and interviews. The studies pointing to the success factors of advergames are mentioned in the references column.
Step 2. Experts were surveyed to evaluate the extracted success factors of advergames and their indicators. The data obtained from the questionnaires collected at this step were analyzed using Student's t-test. The main question at this step was whether the proposed factors and their indicators are confirmed or not? Statistical significance was calculated to

Codes
Examples of illustrative quotes Providing information about product/ brand features Advertising games must include a collection of product or brand information. This is the philosophy behind the design of such games and the activity must be done upon it Brand placement in the game In advertising games, players should be able to communicate with the companies that have been targeted for advertising through links and other features. It is advisable to include the contact information of companies in games Matching the advertising content with the target players The set of messages intended for advertising should match the gender, age and other characteristics of target groups for which the game is designed Creating the involvement of the player with the brand In advertising games, the game must be designed in such a way that the audience's mind becomes dependent on and involved with it. It should not be just in a way that after finishing the game, the player considers it as a game like any other game and leaves it Matching the type of game with the product/brand To advertise any product, it is better to use a game appropriate for it. For example, it is better to use car racing games to advertise a car Providing the ability to compare different brand products in the game To allow players to make better choices and to be encouraged to purchase, it is better that the comparability of different brand products exists in the game Gender If we have an appropriate audience analysis before designing games, gender segregation in how messages and their content are placed will further enhance the success of the program Age In addition to understanding the gender of the audience, recognizing and separating different age groups has an impact on the game design and message content Technical skills How well players are familiar with the game's tools such as PCs, tablets, mobiles and so on and how to work with them is also influential to the success of the game Players' interest in the game Some people are always interested in computer games while some others have no interest in these games at all. The more people are willing to play, the more successful these games will be Game addiction Some people's interest goes beyond playing games; they somehow get addicted to them * Ability to manage a large number of players * Table 3. Success factors for advergames assess whether the criteria had mean values larger than 3. Table 4 presents the results of the Student's t-test of measures.
The results of Student's t-test showed that the means of all criteria are significantly higher than 3 (test point in Student's t-test). This shows that there is a strong agreement on all the extracted success factors and criteria of advergames; therefore, they were confirmed according to the experts' viewpoints. The results of factor analysis indicated that all items had high factor loading for their respective factors (higher than 0.4) and there was no significant cross loading; hence, convergence and discriminate validity of the construct were supported. The total variance explained of four factors was 61.92%, which was higher than the acceptable level.

Discussion and conclusions
This study aimed to identify key success factors of advertising games. After a comprehensive review of the literature using qualitative analysis, spoken evidence was identified, and after extracting the concepts and categories, the survey method was used to survey the experts' opinions through a questionnaire. According to the results, the success factors of advertising games include game design factors, players' personality-related factors, brand/productrelated factors and technical factors. Finally, the results of factor analysis showed that the relative ranking of factors varies according to their respective variance explained (see Table 5). The most important critical success factors (in order of importance reflected by the percentage variance they explain) were game design factors, technical factors, players' personality-related factors and brand/product-related factors. The critical success factors of advergames are described as follows: Game design factors were considered as one of the key success factors of advergames in the experts' standpoint (Wanick et al., 2018). This recommends advergames designers to consider features such as offering the players to choose the difficulty level, the possibility to invite family/friends, explicit rules in the game, game navigation, the possibility to play in groups, the possibility to create players' characters or symbols in the game, offering the players a variety of rewards, showing the scoring lists of players, using celebrity characters in games and comparing players' progress to create an emotional relationship between the players and the game because the purpose of these games is to make users involved and engaged.
Brand/product-related factors were identified as important factors to advergames success implementation. Based on the results, brand/product-related factors have been referred to by Catal an et al. (2019) and Mart ı-Parreño et al. (2013). Attractiveness of advergames in the users' viewpoints is related to the brand/product itself. Some features such as providing information about product/brand features, brand placement in the game, matching the advertising content with the target players, creating the involvement of the players with the brand, matching the type of game with the product/brand and providing the ability to compare different brand products in the game have a key role in users' acceptance and successful implementation of advergames.
Players' personality-related factors were viewed as another category of advergames' success factors. It is recommended that software developers have an appropriate audience analysis before designing the game and determine for what age and gender groups they are going to design the advertising game. Hudson and Hudson (2006) focused on the factor of characteristics of the target community. One of the concerns that have always existed in the field of advertising games is that the main audience of these games and their advertisements are children (Radesky et al., 2020), who do not have the power to understand the commercial nature of advertising messages and discuss the social responsibility of marketers. This means that advergame developers must consider the social and cultural Technical factors were categorized as another vital factor in advergames success. It is suggested that advertising games as software must satisfy the appropriate technical features suitable for design such as the ability to play games online and offline, ability to play games on various devices, easy access to the game, low game size, game reliability, enjoying high graphics, proper use of soundtrack tailored to the courses, proper use of soundtrack matched to the game rounds, presence of a recommender system in games to improve player performance, the possibility to chat with other players and the ability to manage a large number of players.

Theoretical and managerial implications
The implications of the proposed framework including success factors and their criteria can be divided into managerial, theoretical and social implications.
Regarding the managerial implications, this study provides insights for organizations to strengthen their advergame implementations and improve the customers' attitude about advergames. To assist in the design and implementation of a successful advergame program, our study identifies the main vital factors that may influence the success of advergame programs. Thus, the results recommend advergame designers to consider the four categories of game design factors, players' personality-related factors, brand/product-related factors and technical factors in the development process of advergames. By providing the ranks and importance of each success factor based on the factor analysis results, we hope that the practitioners will be able to save time and effort to develop more effective advergames with regard to the limited budget of marketing. The game design aspect is the most important factor among the advergame success factors. A poor and complicated design of advergames will hamper the customers' motivation to play games.
Some recommendations, which could be valuable for game developers, organizations and digital marketers, are as follows: (1) In the implementation of advergames, organizations, marketing managers and game developers must consider the requirements and principles of game design such as offering the players to choose the difficulty level, the possibility to invite family/ friends, explicit rules in the game, game navigation and so on.
(2) In the development of advergames programs, brand/product-related factors as well as game features must be viewed. In this paper, six criteria including features such as providing information about product/brand features, brand placement in the game, matching the advertising content with the target players, preoccupying the players with the brand, matching the type of game with the product/brand and comparability of different brand products in the game were embedded in the proposed framework.
(3) To successfully design advergame programs, players' personality-related factors such as gender, age, technical skills, player's interest in the game and addiction to the game must be considered. Since the advertising content for one group is different from the other, appropriateness of message content for target community will determine the success of advertising games.
(4) To implement advergame programs, technological considerations that are viewed as the ability to play games online and offline, the ability to play games on various devices, easy access to the game and so on must be taken into account.
With regard to theoretical implications, the proposed framework for the successful implementation of advergames makes three main contributions: (1) Reviewing the literature reveals that previous studies have been fragmentedly conducted about the application of digital games on marketing practices, each of them focusing on separate issues. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of advergames, a comprehensive framework containing all aspects of advergames implementation is required, which is missed in the current advergame literature. The main contribution of the current study is to develop an integrated framework for identifying the success factors of advergame implementation. The framework suggests that for implementing advergames, game design factors, brand/productrelated factors, technological factors and players' personality-related factors, as well as technological considerations must be taken into account.
(2) Second, it provides a comprehensive checklist of success factors of advergame implementation. It also helps the marketers to identify the weaknesses and strengths of advergames projects and set appropriate improvement strategies.
(3) Third, regarding the qualitative methodology utilized in the first step of this research, using semistructured interviews along with the literature review, the proposed framework simultaneously has taken advantage of the most successful international experiences in the area of advergame implementation and the opinions of experts. The sample consists of both marketing experts and game designer experts, which lead to data triangulation.
As for social implications, it is worthy to state that in the current society, mobile phones, laptops, tablets and so on are widely used, and there is great interest in playing games among a large number of people in the community; all this provides the ground for the successful use of advertising games. In the economic sphere of a society, the success of a country's businesses and companies will absolutely help to improve the economic situation of that country. Currently, the success of countries depends to a large extent on new technologies, and if they do not pay due attention to this issue, they will lose their market share and lag behind other countries. In the social sphere, the use of advertising games will improve the success of start-ups and game developers considerably.

Limitations and suggestions for future research
Although the findings of this study contribute to the theory of Health 2.0 development, it is not without limitations. First, the applicability of the proposed framework was not shown in a case study; therefore, it is suggested to apply the findings in a selected case and identify the weaknesses and strengths of its advergame program. Second, in this study, the relationships between factors themselves and their impact on digital marketing performance and sales have not been assessed; it is recommended to use quantitative methods such as SEM or DEMATEL to measure these relationships. Third, this study investigated the success factors of the application of gamification in advertisement (advergame); it is suggested to explore the success factors of application of gamification in other business areas such as HR, sales or learning. Identifying the success factors of advergames