Product placement applications in video games: A content analysis for sports games

With the rapidly developing technology, video games have become easily accessible to consumers today. The game phenomenon has become one of the leisure activities of today's people thanks to the increasing number of game platforms and the increasing number of video games. As expected, the interest of the advertising sector in the gaming industry, which has been living its brightest times, has been intense. The many advantages of video games encourage companies to engage in advertising around games. Factors such as voluntarily spending time, high interactivity, easy accessibility and long playing times make video games an excellent advertising medium. Advertising activities within video games are found in various structures such as advergames, around-Game advertising and in-game advertising, but this thesis has been examined in the context of in-game advertising. In the first part of the thesis, the concept of product placement, which is the basis of today's in-game advertising activities, was mentioned. In the second part, the history of game advertising and its current position are explained with examples and the effectiveness of in-game advertising is discussed. In the last section, the most popular and played games in the 2018 - 2019 period, MotoGP 19, FIFA 19, Madden NFL 19, F1 2018 and NBA 2K19, which contain in-game advertising activities, are analyzed with content analysis.