Jiangnan Xu
HCI Researcher + PhD Student + Designer
Advertising in Location-Based Games:
An Exploration in Pokémon GO
Timeline
2021.08-10: User Interview
2021.10-12: Data analysis
2021.12-2022.01: Write up
Role/Team
UX researcher,
Interview data coder, Second author.
With 1 senior UX researcher, and 1 PhD advisor
Methodology
Mixed
(Qualitative + Quantitative);
Semi-structured Interview (N=35), Statistical Analysis
Project Background, Research Question, and Goals
Many small businesses are "hidden" in our surroundings without being highlighted on mainstream map applications. Worse, against the global pandemic crisis, small businesses suffered from an extreme lack of customers due to city lockdowns and social constraints.
To this end, Niantic created a new feature - Sponsored Location in the location-based game Pokémon Go. Business owners can access a broad audience of players by becoming a Sponsored Location. Players can see small businesses on the game map and get fun gameplay and rewards for visiting the business.
Are our users (i.e., small-business owners) satisfied with this new feature?
Understand customers' user experience and expectations. And make suggestions on future design.
Stakeholders and Research Arena
Location-based advertising (LBA), such as billboards and signage, has long been a direct-to-consumer advertising staple. As locative media such as Location-Based Games (LBG) rises, digital LDA becomes increasingly appealing. In this project, we explore the impacts of LBA on small businesses in the LBG Pokémon GO, a lacuna in the literature.
We recruited participants through Niantic's customer contact lists (N=35). We investigated their experience through one-on-one semi-structured interviews with businesses leveraging Niantic’s sponsored location LBA.
Main Results and Take-aways
(1) participant businesses found LBG advertising to be satisfactory,
(2) LBG advertising improves brand recognizability for local commerce, and
(3) local community is essential for LBG's advertising success.
These findings indicate future patterns for integrating local businesses into LBG, like Pokémon GO, suggesting the potential for LBG advertising to assist local businesses.
Overall, business owners gave positive feedback on the new feature, and most of them are willing to recommend it to others:
Notably and happily, their business got more exposure since business location has been put on the game map:
Project Reflection
This project helped me deepen my understanding of user experience studies and how technologies could suggest new customer opportunities. Additionally, the article based on this user study was published on ACM CHI 2022, my first academic work.
In this project, we investigated the perspectives of business owners and we would continue our work to understand players' perceptions. In addition, to better conduct user interviews, I will prepare myself better with participants' backgrounds. This way, I can further shift my mind to the user's shoes and gain more insights during data collection.
Future Steps
To have a whole picture of the possibility of advertising in the game, we must also understand players' angles. In future work, we will need to interview players and understand how in-game advertisements influence their game experience, the purchasing experience, and human-place interactions.