Come Play Along! An Exploration of How Advertisers are Using Playful Strategies in Print Advertising

The fact that people are increasingly eager to seek out playful experiences in their everyday lives is part of a trend known as the ludification of culture. Scholars find that, in a time characterized by information overload, consumers are open and drawn to media products that offer entertainment through playful interaction. Meanwhile, the advertising industry is faced with the quandary of how to stand out and attract consumers’ fleeting attention in a landscape that has become highly competitive. Print advertising in particular faces a budget decline and has to compete with digital advertising forms that know richer affordances to appeal to consumers’ attention. For this reason, this thesis questions the strategies that print advertising is using in order to stand out from the crowd and appease the demand to provide entertaining playful interaction for consumers. The research problem lies in the intersection of the ludification of culture trend and the advertising industry’s competitive attention economy: research on purely playful forms of communication and the declining print advertising sector has been minimal. To this end, this bachelor thesis tackles the following research question: How do advertisers make use of playful communication strategies in print advertisements to stand out in the contemporary attention economy? To gain a comprehensive answer to this research question a qualitative approach was taken. First, a review of applicable research was conducted to ground the study in a theoretical framework of existing concepts and principles related to play and playfulness. Next, methodological choices were made that deemed a textual analysis of print advertisements the ideal method for studying the research question. Using thematic analysis, the units of analysis were analyzed through multiple rounds of coding that eventually resulted in the emergence of four central themes of playful strategies. The main findings of this research are that advertisers are able to stand out by ensuring retention through strategies of pleasurable interactive experiential logic. This is facilitated by the finding that advertisers are able to stand out by harnessing attention through strategies of playful visual design that instills a playful mindset. They furthermore stand out by liberating unspoken topics of a dark, solemn and negative nature in a playful way. And lastly, advertisers are able to stand out by using playful communication strategies with an adequate awareness of the playful risks involved. The conclusions and implications drawn from these findings are impactful theoretically and practically. Regarding the former, contributions to an understanding of interactivity and to negative pleasurable experiences are made, and a need for further inquiry in playification is identified and encouraged. Regarding the latter, the benefit for advertisers to use playful print advertising strategies in their marketing mix is explained and ethical concerns regarding the persuasion of the strategies are expressed. The thesis closes by pointing out directions for future research.