Animated Online Advertisement : Investigating the Impact of Different Shading Styles on Recognition

Abstract: Background. Since e-commerce has grown rapidly the focus and attention towards online advertisement are critical. Twitch.tv, one of the big streaming websites had in April 2020 an average of 2.48 million concurrent viewers.  Bigger brands have taken notice and started to invest in advertisements during e-sports and other online streams. This thesis has conducted an experiment that analyses the recognition of animated advertisements with different shading styles during gameplay streaming. Objectives. This thesis compared animated advertisements shaded in two different ways. The advertisements were shown during a clip from a game. One of the shadings was a toon-shading which was the same art style as the game. This was compared with Unreal Engine 4’s standard shading (Default Lit with Surface as Material Domain). The aim was to find out which of the shading styles were more likely to be recognized. Methods. An experiment was conducted where participants watched a clip of gameplay from Borderlands 2. At certain moments during the clip different advertisements would appear for a short time, one at a time.  The advertisements had different shadings, toon-shading, or standard-shading. The goal was to find out which type of shading participants would recognize more than the other. The participants answered a survey after watching the clip where they chose from different images. The images were either images of the animated advertisement or mock images to test what the participant recognized. Results. The data gathered from the survey showed that the standard shading in Unreal Engine 4 had a recognition rate of 75.0% whilst toon-shaded characters had 82.7%. This means that there was a difference of 7.7% in the rate of recognition between the shading styles. There were a total of 26 participants between the ages of 19 to 30. Conclusions. The expected outcome was that the users would not recognize the cartoon styled advertisements since it would blend into the gameplay of Borderlands 2. The standard shaded advertisements would not blend in with the gameplay and should have a higher recognition rate. The result, however, proved that the expected outcome of the experiment was incorrect. There were a few other noteworthy findings that can be further researched.