TV commercials: Improving viewers engagement through gamification and second screen

More and more people watch TV with a second device in the nearby. They use it for many different reasons: to play, to search for something, to interact with other people, etc. As a result, their visual attention is often turned to the second screen, especially during commercials. This scenario scares broadcasters, as they fear losing the advertisers' investment. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the engagement between viewers and commercials. Both broadcasters and advertisers are trying to identify the right approach, but an effective solution has yet to be found. In this paper, we propose to use the gamification approach to increase the engagement between viewers and commercials. Our idea is to modify the visual layout of commercial breaks by introducing game elements (i.e., a quiz with simple questions related to some selected commercials). Through an experimental assessment, we evaluated the effectiveness of our proposal and the results show that not only the viewers enjoyed playing the quiz-based game, but also show that the engagement between viewers and commercials improved considerably (i.e., from 30% to 70%)