Gamification of E-commerce advertising

Online advertising is now a multi-billion dollar industry, with ads covering almost every popular website on the internet, promoting e-commerce products and services. However, with a large amount of ads that internet users are faced with daily, advertisement fatigue occurs and technologies have been developed to help block online advertisements altogether. Traditional online advertising is losing its effectiveness in influencing consumers to be interested in learning more about a product. This project will explore the usage of Gamification for the purpose of engaging users in the advertisements of e-commerce products, and get them interested in learning more about the product. It will investigate whether introducing game mechanics into advertising will help improve the click through rates of online ads and enhance audience engagement. A web application, Wantaton, has been developed to test this hypothesis. This application will include several Gamification mechanics and will be tested on a sample population consisting of NTU students as the audience, and real e-commerce vendors as the advertisers. Results from 2 rounds of open Beta testing showed an approximate 50 fold increase (from 0.5% to 29%) when advertisements were packaged in a gamified platform with several gamification mechanics. This strongly suggests that introducing gamification mechanics is a good tool to help influence human behaviour, and further development will have to be done on Wantaton to help it be a truly effective gamified platform.Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Science